The people in Montague would rather make up their own rules as they go along to suit their racist agendas.

stash - I don't think it's true that "all the other town committees rotate chairmen every year". For years (decades?), Ernie Brown was the chair of the ZBA; that stopped when he finally retired. When I started on the Finance Committee in 1999 people would be chair for a year or two and then someone else would take over, but when John Hanold came along he was into it and nobody else wanted to do it so he was there for a while. I think the Selectboard may have been unusual in having had a defined rotation system, which stopped a few years back when Ed Voudren, Sam Lovejoy, and Pat Allen were on the board.

How many people really want to run a town meeting where you have to consider legal ramifications of everything you say? Some people I assume would want to be on the selectboard to be involved in making informed descions instead of only being involved at the ballot box.