At a recent Board of Selectmen (BOS) meeting, board members approved the call for the annual town meeting to formally receive annual reports from boards and commissions to be held Monday, May 13. However, the perfunctory meeting call raised questions about the structure of local government and what changes might or should be considered in future.

Holding an annual town meeting is a requirement of the town charter. Last year, the meeting had a fairly abysmal attendance rate, a grand total of three people. First Selectman Matt Hoey said he, Town Clerk Anna Dwyer, and fellow Selectman Sue Renner were the only people in attendance.

“The meeting is really just a formality as we receive the multiple reports from the various commissions and so we decided that we are going to move it a Monday morning meeting,” he said.

The commission reports are published in a book for the public and put on the town website after the annual meeting.

When setting the meeting date, selectmen began to discuss how certain charter requirements and necessary meetings might be in need of some review. Selectman Charlie Havrda said it might be time to look at some mechanics of the charter again.

Taking a look at the charter would require a charter review committee. Hoey noted that when the charter comes up for review, the whole document is opened for review; he said the selectmen can’t designate a small list of things it would like to see changed.

“That’s why if you get a list of things that you would like to look at in some point in time, if the list is long enough, maybe then in a year or two its worth taking a look at a formal review,” Havrda said.

Hoey said a formal charter review is complicated and can be expensive due to legal fees, but it would be worth having a large discussion with the full BOS because this isn’t the first time a charter review question has been brought up in recent months.

“After the referendum last week, I was approached and someone suggested to me that owing to the 20 percent turnout or lack of substantial turnout as compared to last election in November when we had 80 percent of voters show up, that we might want to consider changing the form of government to go to a representative town meeting (RTM),” he said.

Havrda, who sat on the last charter review committee back in the early 2000s when the BOS moved from a three to five-member board with four year terms instead of two, said that an RTM form of government had been discussed at that time as well.

“That was under the last charter revision when we to five selectmen,” he said. “It’s worth the discussion again because we had some very good discussion back then…there are very compelling reasons on both sides of the argument.”

Selectmen are expected to continue the discussion at an upcoming meeting. The annual Town Meeting is Monday, May 13 at 8:30 a.m. at Town Hall.