By Sara Withee
(Oct. 30, 2026) – Come Fall, Special Town Meeting is the story in many local communities. But another story comes the Friday after Special Town Meetings. Many of us are interested in seeing the results, especially if we invested our time and attended. Did our Town Managers, Town Administrators, Town Clerks, Town Moderators and Select Boards share these results with us before leaving the office for the weekend?
Three local communities convened Special Town Meetings this week, including Ayer, Littleton and Westford. Ayer News attended the Ayer and Littleton meetings in-person; we did not attend the Westford meeting.
In Littleton, unofficial results were shared on the town website after the meeting. Here are the results posted on the Town of Westford website. Both towns share results for each article, line by line. These were posted on the website home pages. Separately, Littleton Community Television shared a meeting video on its Facebook page.
Not Ayer. The Town of Ayer convened its Special Town Meeting on Monday night and residents voted to approve all 12 articles. There were a mix of zoning articles, Community Preservation Fund and other articles which required different majority approvals.
We acknowledge this: the Ayer Public Access Corporation released the video on its YouTube channel, but there was no push-out, active share to residents. It wasn’t shared online via Facebook. We know where to find the video after years of asking for information. But not everyone does or knows when the video will be shared.
But as we’ve said in the past, Ayer Public Access Corporation is not part of the Town of Ayer. And a video is not a compiled list, sharing results. And a video doesn’t share information for the long-term: it’s not searchable or reference able in the same format as the Special Town Meeting warrant.
Residents Gave Their Time
We gave the town our time this week. Residents listened to presentations from a number of Town of Ayer employees with this meeting; the DPW Director, Land Use Director/Planner, the Community Development Program Manager, the Deputy Police Chief and we passed their articles. We gave the Town of Ayer even more time on Article 6, the proposed tree preservation bylaw, even though some residents didn’t want to.
The Town of Ayer last shared meeting results after the Fall 2025 Special Town Meeting, when residents approved a debt-exclusion to fund the new senior center. In that case, the town emailed results to residents. Ayer News wrote an article last August about the town’s approach to reporting Town Meeting results, Click to read this article. Three meetings have now passed without the town sharing results in a helpful way.
There may be a different decision-making process across the three towns. Ayer has a Town Manager government, with a town clerk who is appointed every three years. Westford and Littleton both have elected town clerks.
Super Town Meeting Next March
The Town of Ayer expects to hold its next Town Meeting in March. The towns of Ayer, Shirley and Harvard are working with MassDevelopment to plan a Super Town Meeting, where residents in each town hold their own meetings on the same day. We hope the Town of Ayer doesn’t just share the results with MassDevelopment and the other towns. We hope the Town of Ayer feels a responsibility to share results with residents. It would help if results were shared in writing, on a screen during the meeting and on a piece of paper/screen after the meeting.
At Littleton’s Special Town Meeting this past week, residents voted via electronic voting devices and the vote totals were tallied on two large screens. Captions were shared across the screens as residents and town employees spoke. In the following days, residents could check the meeting results document online later in the week. There was a lot of opportunity for confirmation. The Town of Ayer hasn’t given us any of these opportunities, not even the result list.
Having a voting results list is important to community news, gives an authoritative reference to check. Without these results, if can take us much longer to share and compile our coverage. And we’re only telling part of the story if we don’t have the town’s results.
This is Our Time
We’re not just a resident, we’re a volunteer on this project. This is our time and we can’t get that back. There are community news projects and newspapers in nearby communities who don’t have to argue for this access.
Follow Up: Town Employee Comments on our Facebook Post
Note: It was Friday, Oct. 30th – 4 days after the Special Town Meeting – around 5:00 pm. A Town of Ayer employee who followed our Ayer News Facebook page saw this article. She shared a link showing that the meeting results were in fact posted. This is frustrating. It’s not the same as the experience that Westford and Littleton residents had: they could expect the town to post results on the home page of their websites during the business week.
We updated this section on Nov. 3, 2026.
