Longmeadow's fall Town Meeting postponed after rise in COVID–19 cases

Nov. 4, 2020 | Miasha Lee

LONGMEADOW – Longmeadow Moderator Rebecca M. Townsend postponed the town meeting scheduled for Oct. 27 at Longmeadow High School.

Longmeadow’s number of positive cases of COVID-19 are at five and neighboring communities where residents often travel are much higher.

On Oct. 22, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health COVID-19 Dashboard map changed Longmeadow from grey to green, with surrounding communities listed as red or yellow.

Under the Massachusetts statute, in order for a moderator to postpone due to a public health emergency, the moderator must consult with the select board and public safety and health officials.

While plans were underway up until Oct. 22, Townsend received a text message from the town manager asking to talk about the COVID-19 numbers. Then she was on a conference call with the Select Board Chair Thomas Lachiusa, the Emergency Management Director John Dearborn and the Health Director Beverley Hirschhorn.

As Townsend explained, “Once we learned that the numbers had been going up to five as of the time that we talked on Thursday and the Department of Public Health map had moved us from gray to green it became obvious to me at least that having an indoor meeting would not be prudent at all. Even if everyone were wearing masks, it just would not be the safest decision to make.”

Technically, Townsend said, they still could have had a meeting. On the other hand, she wanted people to feel comfortable to attend. Townsend heard that many people weren’t comfortable even without them going to green.

She replied, “An indoor meeting was causing people concern and a town meeting is entirely about citizen participation and if people are afraid to come then we shouldn’t have it.”

The Massachusetts Department of Health map is a formula based on the average daily case rate over a 14-day period to determine the number, which in turn determines the community’s color on the map. It relates to the number of cases per population per 100,000.

Town Manager Lyn Simmons stated, “When MassDPH launched the color-coded map this summer, Longmeadow was originally in the yellow (when the map was first published). In the following map updates our cases number declined and our color on the map was downgraded to gray. We then remained in the gray zone for quite a while, as of the Thursday, October 22 map we moved to the green zone.”

According to the DPH map, Gray (<5 reported cases), Green (<4 cases per 100k), Yellow (4 to 8 cases per 100k) and Red (>8 cases per 100k).

“When we held the annual town meeting in June,” Simmons said. “The town moderator (in consultation with town manager, health director and emergency management director) was looking at case numbers as the determining factor on whether to conduct that meeting back in June. At the time, the town moderator was looking at a threshold of five cases and that similar threshold was used for this fall town meeting."

She went on to say, “We’ve been monitoring what’s been happening in the state and around the region relative to case increases. Longmeadow case numbers had been constantly hovering between one and three cases since roughly the beginning of June. The week of October 19 we began noticing that we were seeing a slight increase in average daily cases and concurred with the town moderator that postponement of an indoor fall town meeting will likely be the best course of action until we could see our numbers decline to a level similar to what we had at the annual town meeting in June and also potentially hold an outdoor meeting.”

The law only allows a town meeting to be extended for 30 days. Therefore, Townsend declared that the continued date of the Special Town Meeting is set for Nov. 17.

However, Townsend responded, “I highly doubt that our community would be in a dramatically different place then we are now. Given that December is also going to be potentially a rough time. I imagine that we would meet in early spring. This is all dependent on what the case counts are like.”

Prior to the June meeting, a group of colleagues from the Massachusetts Moderators Association and Townsend put together a guidebook for communities that included measures such as a large degree of spacing between people so seating is at least 6 feet apart, masks requirements, sanitizer stations throughout the facility, orderly assembly and seating by row instead of letting people come in and seat wherever they want, and  orderly dismissal rather than everybody leave at the same time.

“There’s a range of procedures that we follow to ensure public safety,” explained Townsend. “Whenever we do hold the meeting, certainly we’re going to keep the same kinds of precautions as we had in the spring meeting for this next one whenever it does occur, but I highly doubt it will be in November given the way the trends have been going.”

She added, “One of the things I want to stress is that town meetings are resilient. They have been around for hundreds of years and they’ve adapted for hundreds of years. This is just one of the ways that we’re adapting. We can still get our business accomplished. We just have to be a little bit more flexible in how we do that.”

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