YACK on: Seats

Here's my column from The Nantucket Independent this week.

I’ve been going to a number of Board of Selectman meetings lately. I find it more interesting and more fun than watching it on TV. And slightly better for my health. That’s because unlike the place I normally watch TV, there’s no refrigerator in the town building filled with cheese and beer and leftover fried chicken legs. (That I know of.) And so there is far less of a likelihood that I will end up snacking my way though Wednesday evening. Which is a good thing.

One thing I don’t like about the meetings is that those of us in the gallery have to sit on those hard, wooden benches through the whole thing, and that can get rather uncomfortable after a two or three-hour session. I end up shifting my weigh several times and scrunching up the balls of my feet and arching my back to get comfortable, but that never works. Those benches are murder on my “nether regions” (especially when I attempt to pick up the feeble wireless signal that’s available in the town building by holding my laptop up at strange angles in order to post a comment on YACKon.com during the meeting). Some nights, I can barely walk out of the place because various parts of my body are numb from poor circulation.

Coincidentally, the space where the selectmen hold their meetings is also the courtroom and I find it somewhat perverse that the jury is made to sit on those same hard benches while the accused criminal gets to sit in one of those comfortable chairs in front of the room. Is that fair? I’ll bet there would be a lot fewer “guilty” verdicts if the jury could sit in plush recliners. After a week on those rather punitive benches, I would not blame any jury for giving a jaywalker life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Interestingly, when Mike Glowacki announced his resignation from the board, the newspapers said that several people had taken out papers to run for his vacant seat. In my case that was literally true. That’s one of the reasons I considered running. The seats are much more comfortable at the front table. In fact, they are cushioned and wide and just soft enough to be relaxing but just firm enough so that the selectmen do not fall asleep during the meeting (I tried one out on a recent Wednesday night). I figure, if you’re going to take the trouble to go to the meetings, you might as well have a comfortable seat, and they’re up front at the table!

In the end, I guess perfectly valid reasons to run for selectman (like plush seating) were outweighed by the reasons not to run, so I decided, prudently, to pull out.

As an aside, there’s a little bit of trivia about the seats at the Selectman’s table that no one has noticed except me and former selectman, Matt Fee. He and I refer to one of the seats at the table as “The Ejector Seat.” As you’re facing the table, it’s the one at the far left, and it is cursed, we believe. If a selectman sits in it, they will not be back for another term. Steve Bender, Tim Soverino, Finn Murphy and several others all sat in that seat in their last term in office and were not back the next year. Even more eerie, Mike Glowacki inexplicably switched seats with Doug Bennett a few weeks before health concerns caused him to step down. Now, Doug is back in The Ejector Seat. And he’s already announced that he will not run for a second term. Coincidence? I really don’t think so. There’s a curse on that chair. If the town has any money left in the budget under the “consultants” line item, it may want to think about hiring a voodoo priest or two to give that chair some good mojo, or whatever it is those voodoo priests do. It would be money well spent, especially if we ever get five selectmen we really, really like, which, I know, is not all that likely, but one can always hope.

In order to increase citizen participation in BOS meetings, I would suggest replacing all of those hard wooden benches with used couches. There are always seven or eight out in the moors dumped there by people who are too cheap to pay the disposal fee at the landfill. The town can spring for some of those matching slip-covers from Pottery Barn so that the courtroom does not end up suffering form a visual cacophony of mis-matched sofas and loveseats.

The moors will be cleaner. More people will come to the meetings. The town will be better run thanks to a higher level of accountability. And people like me will be less likely to be critical of the Board because we will no longer associate our highest elected officials with a sharp pain in our posteriors.

YACK on.

Grant Sanders is the Host of YACK, the Nantucket Online Community at yackon.com, which, this week sadly lost one of its long-time YACKers, Arch McColl (who was also a friend and a damn good mechanic). Our thoughts and prayers are with Arch’s family.