MARBLEHEAD — Town Meeting approved local meals and rooms taxes in its opening night, but technological hiccups ultimately forced the meeting to pause after Article 26, leaving the back-half of the warrant for night two on Tuesday.
A smattering of technical issues plagued the opening of Town Meeting, causing it to take more than an hour to move through procedural articles. Issues ranged from audio cutting out in the overflow chamber outside of the middle school’s auditorium and video projector issues that prevented the timely display of the articles being voted on. The issues were finally ironed out by about 8:40 p.m., nearly two hours in.
The meeting also saw the successful launch and use of an electronic clicker system for vote tracking, which showed that Town Meeting opened with more than 800 people when a vote of 704 to 97 was tallied to close out Article 6. More than an hour later, a narrow, three-vote margin was tabulated in 20 seconds with no need for further verification or manual tallying.
Dozens of Marblehead union employees lined the entrance to the auditorium at Veterans Middle School prior to the start of the meeting, calling for a restoration of prior cuts that took place to balance prior budgets.
“There’s no more room to cut that budget,” said Jonathan Heller, co-chairperson of the Marblehead Education Association. “They’ve been able to bridge between a reduced budget and level-service budget. That’s what we’re hoping this town will approve tonight, to get us back to level budget at first.”
The unions were quiet during the meeting, however, with a brief comment from Terri Tauro, president of the Marblehead Municipal Employees Union, on an indefinitely postponed article on the police contract.
“I’d like to start with a shout-out to our town employees,” Tauro said. “Marblehead’s town employees educate your children and keep them safe. We keep your power on, plow the snow, and care for your aging parents.
“For many of us, the wages we make working for the town are far less than what it would take to live in the town,” Tauro said. “It may soon be that our wages won’t cover living in this state. Massachusetts is, after all, the fourth most expensive state in this country to live.”
The first articles to receive substantial debate were 24 and 25, two measures to add meals and lodging taxes, with each factoring in generating about $200,000 in revenue for the budget passed in Article 26.
Debate also focused on the reported 261 short-term rental units that exist and are presently untaxed in Marblehead, a group of property owners that one resident Monday night suggested would put the town’s only two hotels at a competitive disadvantage.
Carolyn Pyburn, of Gilbert Heights Road, sought instead to lower the 6% proposed for the rooms tax down to 4%. That vote failed by a razor-thin margin of 391 to 394 — a result that arrived within 20 seconds with the new voting method.
“This is another no-brainer,” said Albert Jordan, a Roosevelt Avenue resident, of the rooms tax. “There’s 351 communities in Massachusetts, and most of them are doing this.”
Peter Conway, an Orchard Street resident, raised another issue with the tax: That many rooms are paid for in advance.
“You can’t go back to the guests who’ve made a contract with you,” Conway said of hotels. “To be fair, that would have to be put off until at least the fall to give the businesses the chance to reach out to people.”
Article 24, the meals tax, passed 515 to 294. The main vote for the rooms tax, after the failed amendment, was 469 to 345. The budget then passed 611 to 63 after a series of votes on individual departments and appropriations that reflected similar approval margins.
The meeting was adjourned following the budget, leaving articles 27 through 53 for night two, Tuesday, beginning at 7 p.m.
Contact Dustin Luca at 978-338-2523 or DLuca@salemnews.com. Follow him at facebook.com/dustinluca or on Twitter @DustinLucaSN.
