Annual meetings are an important part of town governance. At annual meetings, the funding of town or school board operations is conducted. In this document I will refer to the town, but the process is identical for the Thornton Central School school district.
The process is this:
- In Q4 of the preceding year, each department puts together budgets for the forthcoming fiscal year. For the town, that year is January 1 – December 31; for the school it is September 1 – June 30.
- The town also puts together other items for which they want to spend money, for example, a capital improvement plan.
- For each of those items, the town prepares a “Warrant Article”. For example, for the 2024 annual meeting the town has “Article 3: To see if the Town will vote to raise and appropriate the sum of twenty-five thousand dollars ($25,000) to be added to the existing Assessing Capital Reserve Fund…”
- In addition, in January and February, the townspeople have an opportunity to present their own warrant articles are called “Petition Warrant Articles” because they only need signatures of 25 voters in the town.
- The town then assembles all the warrant articles into a “Thornton Town Warrant”. This official warrant is required to be signed and posted no later than 14-days prior to the annual meeting. You can see the one for 2024 on HERE.
So what happens at the actual annual meeting? You should know this is an official meeting and all those wishing to vote will be checked against the voter registration list and handed a number of official placards, for example one red with a large “Yes” and another yellow with a large “No” on it. When asked to vote you will hold up your desired card. The person in charge and the master of ceremonies, so to speak, is the Moderator. Moderator is an elected position. The Moderator will have established rules for the meeting. The rules for the 2024 School District Annual Meeting are HERE.
Each warrant article is then read by the moderator and discussed. If you want to offer comments on the article, you line up behind the microphone and wait your turn. Note that anyone can speak to amend the warrant article. Amendments must not change the intent of the article, for example, you can make a motion to “Amend the amount on the article from $5,000 to $6,000” but you cannot make a motion to amend it to spend it on something else. A motion to amend an article must be seconded, then there is discussion and a vote on the amendment. That proposed amendment either passes or fails. Discussion then proceeds either on the original warrant article or the amended version.
But importantly, once an article is either passed or rejected, there can be a motion later in the meeting to “reconsider” the article. This motion to reconsider also goes to a vote and it it passes, then it’s as if the previous vote and discussion didn’t happen. (For votes on warrant articles for bond issues greater than $100,000 the reconsideration vote does not happen at this meeting, it happens at a separate meeting within seven days.