It is a small but important distinction; I say it isn't public because the the moderator doesn't have to let "the public" into the meeting, such as those non-voter visitors. Only registered voters and a few select town/school employees are required by law.

In a regular public meeting (at least in MA, where the state Open Meeting Law governs public meetings) you simply can't do that, you must let everyone in, even random tourist visitors who just want to watch. Town Meetings are not under open meeting law, they have their own laws (in fact two chapters of state laws).

I've been to Town Meetings in maybe ten towns, and as part of a job a friend has been to several dozen. The moderators are always happy to welcome guests, but (for example) the auditorium in my own town is small enough that the moderator sometimes does not let visitors in until it is clear there will be enough space for all voters first. Perfectly legal, but if the selectmen did that for a selectmen's meeting (a public meeting), it would be an open meeting law violation.

Thanks for the kind words, though I'm a bit more modest about smarts, mostly I have had the opportunity to attend various state municipal org meetings where experienced town officials and lawyers discuss exactly this kind of stuff. I've been in various town functions for quite a few years, it is mostly fun, met some good people, and hopefully did & still do some good.

> Town Meeting

Minor nit/explanation: a Town Meeting technically isn't a public meeting; it is a semi-closed meeting of a town legislature that just happens to have a lot of legislators. They don't even have to let non-voter general public in. I have seen some debate (from attorneys and moderators) about how much this ruling will effect Town Meetings (short summary: no one knows for sure), as opposed to all the regular board meeting in a town which are definitely covered by it.

>but look into a citizens petition for town meeting

Go for it! Just 10 signatures for a citizen petition article at an annual town meeting, and 100 for a special town meeting (caveat: while rare, a town charter can change those numbers, so double check with your town clerk).

>Also know that the public MUST be able to speak at Town Meeting, but not every municipality has Town Meeting.

Sorry to be pedantic, but this is not exactly right. Every registered voter has the right to speak at a Town Meeting. A Town Meeting is a legislative body, and only "legislators" (voters) have an unconditional right to address it (much like only city counsellor have the right to speak in a city council meeting). Since I'm being pedantic, state and local laws also allow some others to address Town Meetings for specific things (like town department heads).

If a board has a "general public input" time, they cannot restrict who talks to even "just residents" or what they say. If a Town Meeting had that kind of "open mic" time they presumably would have to let anyone (voters and non-voters) speak, but I have never heard of a Town Meeting having that, usually you can only talk about specific warrant items.

If someone wants the long discussion of why Town Meetings (as opposed to generic town board meetings) can restrict speakers: 1st US circuit court opinion in Curnin v. Town of Egremont. It is short and readable.

Arlington is a funny town, they were also "dry" until a few years ago. Maybe it is conflict between some townies who want no change and newer people.

I don't usually buy gas in Arlington (though I have some family there), but I used to go through Milford a lot when they were no-self-serve, and the gas was always more than surrounding towns. OTOH I drive through Maynard some, and the cheapest gas there is the only full-serve station, so I don't know.

Arlington even had a vote to change it a few years ago. It lost, so Arlington is still no-self-serve. [minor edit for clarity]

Probably the same people who think there are >90M people in NYC.

I think the money part of the article was probably a bit of Globe yellow press hysteria. Rockport isn't a poor town, they have $112K median income and a >$30M annual budget. From the article it looks like much of the current legal action/cost for this so far is in the MA AG's office anyway.

I currently live in a small town, and (though not on the ocean) we've been sued many times by rich snobs and others like developers, and have generally not had big costs defending (I think the record was someone claimed they spent ~$150K suing the town, insinuating in a public meeting that the town must be spending a similar amount defending. We actually spent ~13K defending and won.) My town's legal budget usually comes to around $30 per household per year, with probably half of that on contract negotiations and personnel issues, so not a huge burden.

That is a bit like one of my high school classmates... except he also had terrible grades and did some major property damage, so UMass just threw him out permanently. He was allowed to go to a state college.

That was over 25 years ago when UMass Amherst was still earning a spot on some annual "top 10 party schools in the US" lists.

Someone I know worked very hard her freshman year to get accepted into the honors program there. Why? Not because she was especially interested in the honors program, but it guaranteed she could move from the towers to different dorm housing.

She said, after the first couple months, despite being on the 5th of 6th floor (I forget which one) she started using the stairs a lot because the the horrible vomit smell in all the elevators, esp Fri-Sun, was too gross to deal with.

More making bad political decisions. It was the politicians who decided to shut the nuclear plants to make the extremist anti-nuclear greens happy, not the engineers.

Germans have a generally good reputation for engineering.

BPS gets a paltry $101M for central administration. They cannot be expected to do all of that stuff properly on such a tiny budget. /s

Chapter 90 is a state law that defines how state highway funds are distributed to local MA communities. It isn't MassDOT or federal highway funds.

Each year the state legislature appropriates (passes a budget with) a certain amount of money for MassDOT and for chapter 90.

MassDOT and sometimes individual communities can (and do) also apply for federal highway funding for projects. It is sometimes a bit more complicated - big projects are usually a mix of state and federal funds (plus sometimes local funds), and MassDOT also plans for a certain amount of federal highway funds each year (much like towns plan for a certain amount of chapter 90 funds). But we sunk many years of what would be MA's federal highway allotment to pay off the big dig, which probably put us way behind on federal highway funds available for the rest of the state.

As the top comment says, US numbered highways are not maintained by the federal government. US route 5 is just a federal designation for maps to help people get around, not any federal claim of ownership or responsibility for repairs.

US 5 might be locally owned or state owned - or even a mix; even if the towns own the "road", often the state owns/maintains the bigger bridges. Who owns it pretty much defines who is responsible for maintaining it. If the state, then MassHighway (for example, they definitely own I91). If the local town owns it, then it is the local town that needs to fix it, either through chapter 90 funds, local tax funds, or they can apply for a federal grant (often hard to get, you are competing with everyone else in the US).

But in the end - your local planning office, highway department, or state rep might be the best people to ask about who is responsible for fixing US5, and to ask why it isn't being fixed.

Hope that helps a little.

The simplest thing to start is to walk around to your windows when it is cold, and just feel for drafts. Roll up a towel, or use something like grey caulk weather cord (something cheap from any hardware store) to block drafts. For doors, there are a variety if fixes, with a rolled up towel a quick fix for drafts under the doors.

If you go to the Framingham Target, the Framingham Walmart is just a quarter mile away and seems bigger than the Hudson one.

If you are going to the Hudson Walmart, you drive near the Marlboro Target next to the Solomon Pond Mall. It is pretty decent and only a few minutes off I290.

>Also if you don’t mind the drive, Whitinsville has a nice Walmart that never gets too crowded and is right off 146

It is nicer than the Worcester Walmart, but every time I've been there it usually seems more crowded. Maybe a time of the week thing.

https://www.bostoncelticshistory.com/collection/sweet-17-champs-in-08/

They claim to have 17 championships. Are they wrong?

A few comment:

- The high speed rail discussion had nothing to do directly with MA. It was a general US discussion, with a later talk about the north-south rail link. I didn't hear anything about something being overcrowded.

- The reason China can do rail like they do is because China can have someone knock on your door and tell you to get out by next week so they can tear down your house to make a rail line. It is disingenuous bordering on dishonest to randomly compare us to China on things like that without qualifying the comment. Around 1.5 million were evicted just to make space for the Beijing Olympics.

- Dukakis was a lying sack of crap in 1991 on the cost of the "big dig". Why anyone would believe him (or even bother to quote him) on lower cost estimates of a north-south link is eye-rolling. I'm no Republican, but I'll go with Baker's numbers.

- There are several good reasons to complete the north-south rail link. But so that someone in Salem can get a job south of Boston probably isn't one of those good reasons. In fact I think it is a pretty dumb reason considering the huge cost, but it was a north shore politician saying it. Yes, it may open up some job opportunities, but it won't reduce much car traffic. What it really does is allow the MBTA to shrink the rail yards at North/South stations, have better commuter rail scheduling, and allow Amtrak to connect NYC to points north much more easily. If Amtrak pays for half, it might be a good investment. If it is just for a few easier commutes, a regular free shuttle between north and south station will be $billions cheaper.

- I was a impressed that Moulton mentioned 500 mile rail distance for HSR. The "green new deal" numpkins go on about nationwide high speed rail. In the US, very few will ever use trains for any long distances. Concentrate on where it will really work, which are those places where HSR can be time-competitive with air.

- Unfortunately if they were being honest and competent about high speed rail, they would directly address the various articles (including in the NYT) of why train projects cost 3x-4x in the US vs. pretty much everywhere else in the world, including western Europe, rather than just "blame congress". The HSR mess in California is an example of that.

High speed rail... from where to where?

And overcrowding? Where? 40% of the city of Boston is still zoned single-family (with the rest of the state already heavily subsidizing Boston's public transit).

What we need is to require super-dense zoning (at least 5 story) anywhere near subway lines, multifamily zoning anywhere inside 128, and denser housing inside 495 and anywhere around commuter rail [edit; this last one - near commuter rail - is being partly implemented under a new law... but Boston got itself exempted]. With enough density we can have enough transit use to upgrade existing public transit and reduce the cars on the road. Spending billions on new transit in sparsely populated areas is just burning money - even worse, because you are wasting money that could have been put to better use.

Even with single-family housing, there are many 10s of thousands of existing lots inside 495 that could be subdivided if the state had more support for adding/expanding town water and sewer.

We don't need the forests and farms west of Worcester to be paved over with even more 1.5 acre subdivisions, and all the associated traffic and other sprawl - basically, we shouldn't aim to be another Houston/Dallas/Phoenix with metro areas literally as big or bigger than the whole state of NJ, and almost as big as all of MA (in area, but with much smaller populations). We can do better.

Rather than high-speed rail to nowhere, I would much rather pay even more for (as an example) a rail line from the Quincy Adams MBTA stop, up 128 to the Woburn intermodal transit station (basically I93 to I93), and have stations where it crosses MBTA lines, and also a bunch of big parking garages at major junctions (like 24, 9, 2, 3, etc). That would be an enormous economic engine for the state, without further intensifying the terribly Boston-centric hub-and-spoke MBTA system.

And then save the high speed rail money for upgrading Amtrak.

Note, WGBH is simply terrible on subjects like this, they assume all economic growth should only be in the city of Boston, and most of the rest of the state merely exists to be bedroom communities for Boston.

>which provide high paying jobs to American sailors.

I don't think this is the original purpose of the Jones act.

It was #1 to keep a shipbuilding industry alive in the US. It was added just after WW1 to avoid the current hand-wringing about allowing advanced chip manufacturing to mostly move offshore.

The #2 reason was similar - to keep a ready supply of merchant marines (civilian sailors) available if needed for another major war (note, that is a different reason than "create high paying jobs", even if the two overlap).

The #3 reason is because foreign-flagged ships have almost zero safety checks (today probably 95%+ are flagged in Panama or Liberia because they are cheap to register there and have no real safety standards or inspections).

>no nuclear

We are shutting down nuclear plants in the northeast and not really replacing them with anything except more natural gas plants, and a little bit of solar.

Even if Cape Wind had actually completed, it was only going to be about 2/3 the power Pilgrim nuclear plant could generate (before it shut).

We are going backwards on electricity generation, and depending more and more on those natural gas power plants ... without even the simple infrastructure to pipe cheap gas in from the nearby Marcellus shale fields.

I have to agree the current politicians are failing us.

>Not to mention the I think 1k solar plants that are operational but not providing power due to lack of certification due to lack of certificators

That seems very German. I worked for a large German company. We (non-Germans) joked "Success has nothing to do with results, success is whether the process has been followed exactly."

You think that's a joke, but unfortunately it isn't.

Germany has been doing pretty much that for years. They are currently fighting hard (thankfully a losing battle so far) against counting nuclear power as "green" in the EU regulations. It is mind-numbing how flat-earther so many Germans are on nuclear power.

The sites in MA are all parks run by the National Park Service.

Many get different formal titles - "national battlefield", "national historic site", "national parkway". Some people get loudly obsessed that there is some special , well defined process that gets a park the title "National Park" (there isn't, it is a political decision).

For example, the St. Louis arch, basically a city park, is titled "Gateway Arch National Park", and presumably that makes it super-special and more important than Minuteman National Historic Park (/s). Though to be fair, it is true that many of the parks titled "National Park" are amongst the more interesting NPS nature parks.

There are no national parks with that title "XXX National Park" in MA. They have formal names like "XXX National Historic Park" or "YYY National Seashore", but (again) they are all "national park units" run by the same National Park Service.

Of course, YMMV on how much that formal title matters.