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Maine’s smallest towns often govern themselves through three person select boards, a structure inherited from an era when civic participation was assumed rather than earned and the business of local government was genuinely simpler. In many communities under 500 residents, that assumption no longer holds.
A three-person board leaves almost no structural room for dissent. When two members agree, the matter is settled. There is little mechanism for the kind of deliberation that builds public trust in the decisions being made, and no additional seat that an engaged community member might seek as a first step into civic life. The result, I see in town after town across Maine, is weekly meetings with no public attendance and a governing board that increasingly resembles a committee managing decline rather than a democracy making choices.
The financial barrier to expanding these boards is genuinely modest. At typical Maine select board compensation levels, adding two members to a three-person board costs a small town less than 1% of its annual operating budget in most cases. That is a small investment in the quality of self governance at a moment when Maine communities face real decisions about development pressure, infrastructure, and their own futures.
A five-person board does not solve everything. But it creates the conditions for better decisions, more legitimate votes, and more pathways for residents to participate in the civic life of the place they have chosen to call home. In towns where engagement is the problem, structure matters.
S. Edward Burns
Burlington