A town that conditions public service on property ownership is not merely drawing a line; it is drawing it in the wrong place.
Since 1935, service on the Board of Finance has been restricted to those who own property. No other municipal body carries this requirement. The CRC just voted not to change this requirement. The rule seemingly persists not because it is logical or well-defended, but because it is familiar. Its defenders offer arguments that, when stated plainly, feel discriminatory.
One Commissioner at a recent charter review commission meeting argued that we are likely to be on the verge of having hundreds of renters coming into the town and that introduces an entirely new voting bloc and that we want to be a little stingy on this point rather than a little wide-minded. That is not an argument about fiscal prudence. It is an argument about who should count, and who should be excluded.
Another voice insisted that only real ownership constitutes investment arguing that if you own real property you’ve actually made an investment in the community. The statement confuses a legal form with a civic fact. Renters pay the taxes embedded in their leases. They absorb increases. They fund the same schools, roads, and services. Their stake is real, even if their names are not inscribed on a deed.
The logic tightens further: a grand list measured in billions, it was argued, should not be influenced by those “not invested.” Yet the category of the “not invested” proves weak upon inspection. Consider a household where property is held in one spouse’s name. The other spouse works, pays, votes and lives the consequences of fiscal policy—yet is excluded. Consider an adult child in a multigenerational home, contributing to expenses and rooted in the community—excluded. Consider a longtime resident who sells a home to downsize into a rental—decades of experience, erased by a transaction. The rule is not a scalpel; it is a crude, blunt instrument.
There was, too, an appeal to the precedent because removing the requirement of ownership was presented to voters ten years ago and failed. Therefore, it is said now, that it need not be raised again. This is a doctrine of civic inertia, and acceptance of continued discrimination. This kind of thinking would have preserved many other exclusions now regarded as indefensible. Our Constitution itself is a record of revisions—amendments that corrected earlier tolerances for inequality. Time should not sanctify a rule; it should test it.
A free society depends on confidence—confidence in citizens to deliberate, to disagree, to decide. The anxiety expressed in recent deliberations points in the opposite direction. There is going to be a shift, and we don’t know how that shift is going to go, argued one member. Precisely the point. That is the condition of democratic life. The answer is not to narrow participation in anticipation of outcomes one might not prefer. It is to trust the process that accommodates them.
The Board of Finance exercises authority over all residents. Its decisions reach every household. Yet eligibility to serve is confined to one category of those residents. This asymmetry is difficult to justify on practical grounds and far more difficult still on constitutional ones. The Equal Protection Clause does not forbid distinctions, but it requires that they be grounded in reason. Ownership is, at best, a poor proxy for the qualities required: judgment, restraint, a sense of obligation to the whole.
A town charter is, at its best, an instrument of governance that reflects the community as it is, not as it was.
There is a simpler principle available, and it is sturdier. Citizenship, not title, is the predicate for public service. The question before the community is not whether renters will serve, nor how many might seek to do so. It is whether they may. That is not a question of economics. It is a question of equality. And equality, unlike property, is not something that can be selectively owned.
