How to actually change something in Cohasset

Step one

Find the body that actually decides your issue.

This step decides where your project lands. Each body in town can say yes to some questions and not to others, so the most useful first move is to bring your issue to the people who have the power to act on it.

In Cohasset, roughly:

• Your school building, your classes, your school’s rules and budget: the School Committee. They hire the superintendent and adopt the school budget. They do not run the police or the roads.
• Streets, sidewalks, parks, local police and fire, the town budget: Select Board, working with the Town Manager.
• State law, and anything about the age you can do something at: your State Representative and State Senator, not anyone in town.

Match the issue to the body first. The rest of the project gets three times easier.

The lever

Ten voters can put your idea on the warrant.

Cohasset runs on open town meeting, where any registered voter may attend, speak and vote. The warrant is the list of every article the meeting will actually vote on, and state law says who can add to it.

For the ANNUAL town meeting, the law is short enough to quote. The Select Board must insert in the warrant every subject requested in writing by “ten or more registered voters of the town”. Ten signatures. That is the entire threshold, and it is the most direct lever an ordinary resident has anywhere in Massachusetts government.

For a SPECIAL town meeting the threshold is different, and it is worth knowing before you start. There the law requires one hundred registered voters, or ten per cent of the town’s registered voters, whichever number is the lesser. So if someone tells you “it only takes ten people,” they are talking about the annual meeting. Ask which meeting you are aiming at before you start collecting signatures.

Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 39, Section 10.

You do not have to be old enough to vote to write the article, gather the people, do the research, or stand up and explain it. You need registered voters to sign it. Most students know more than ten registered voters: they live with two of them.

Call the Town Clerk at 781-383-4100 and ask two questions: when is the next annual town meeting, and what is the deadline to submit a citizen petition article. The Clerk’s office answers this question all the time. Asking it is itself the civic skill.

What to bring

Ask for one specific thing.

“Do something about the buses” is a concern. “Move the 7:10 stop on Washington Street two hundred feet north so it is not on a blind curve” is an ask. A specific request can be said yes to. A general concern is where a project starts, and turning it into one specific request is what lets a board act on it.

Bring three things: the specific ask, who it affects and how many of them, and what it would take to do it. If you do not know what it would take, say so and ask. Officials are far more willing to help someone who has clearly done the reading.