As Town Meeting Day approaches my mind goes back to three years ago, when our founder, John Odum, was engaged in a hotly contested race for Montpelier City Clerk. He won by a couple of hundred votes, but it was a real campaign, with yard signs, handouts, and everything.
So John took office and he immediately started doing great things in the job. Here's one example from the city clerk's Facebook page:
As many of you who come by frequently know, since the nearly 3 years since I arrived in the office, we have changed the way we process and provide access to land records. Our new system allows us, not only to make land records and indexes available online, but also to turn around those records and make them available on the same day they arrive, breaking up a backlog that was sometimes as long as 3 months.
Even more exciting is that these changes allowed us to decrease the costs by around 2/3rds. This is a major reason why I was actually able to present my third departmental budget in a row that was actually a decrease from the previous year.
Now we have entered phase two, and by utilizing a standalone fund specifically set aside for document preservation, phase two adds no money to the Clerk's operating budget.
And what about the election contest he faced three years ago?Well, here's a clip from this year's sample ballot: