Williamstown's READI Committee Talks About Town Budget Priorities
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The town's diversity committee last week discussed how it might advocate for directing more municipal spending toward social services.
The Racial Equity, Accessibility, Diversity and Inclusion Committee began its meeting with a report from Shana Dixon, who occupies the READI chair dedicated to a member of the Select Board.
Dixon updated her colleagues on the Select Board's most recent meeting, when board members were encouraged to share their budget priorities for fiscal year 2027 with Town Manager Robert Menicocci.
Dixon noted that she chose not to say much at the Nov. 10 Select Board meeting, but one week later, she told her READI colleagues that she questioned whether the town's budget priorities served all residents equitably.
"The word 'services' was thrown around so much during that meeting," Dixon said. "They kept saying, 'We provide a lot of services.' Being a new Select Board member, I wondered how a marginalized person views 'services' that are actually being offered and how they benefit from them.”
Chair Noah Smalls said Williamstown has done a good job providing for services like road maintenance and fire protection, but it has done less to address the kind of social services Dixon pointed to.
"There's less, I believe, an understanding of what the need is in regard to social services, and that makes it way more difficult to provide them or to connect people with them," Smalls said. "Maybe we could pull whatever evaluation does exist, assuming some exists at the town level, around what the needs are for social services. And then, whatever isn't visible, we could work to make visible."
Dixon, not for the first time in either a READI or Select Board meeting, said the answer could lie in a September 2023 report from the Williamstown Community Assessment Research Project (CARES).
The CARES report, the result of months of study and interviews by paid and volunteer social workers, included seven pages with dozens of recommendations for town actions ranging from big-ticket items, like a new community center, to smaller steps, like training board and committee members in facilitating conversation at public meetings.
In the short term, Dixon said it would not be too late for the READI Committee to make requests for the FY27 budget, which will be hammered out by the Finance Committee this winter in preparation for the spring annual town meeting.
"We'd have to discuss what we want the money for," Dixon said. "With the political climate and everything going on, I don't know how it would play out for us to ask for funds."
"I'm never concerned how it will play," Smalls replied. "If it's something the town needs and it would help the town and it would help our mission, we should ask for it. If they throw me out the window for asking, it will be a long, proud fall.
"I think we do ourselves a disservice to not ask for what we believe is the right thing and what's needed for fear of being rejected."
Dixon reported that much of the Nov. 10 Select Board meeting was given to a discussion about the lack of growth in the town's property tax base and how revenues are not able to keep pace with rising expenses. Andrew Art noted that the work of the READI Committee is connected with economic development in town.
"Another area for development would be creating an environment where people feel they're welcome here," Art said. "That's where it intersects with our committee."
The READI committee on Monday did not vote on any specific funding requests for the next fiscal year at Monday's meeting, but the topic could come up when Smalls and committee member Andrew Art sit down with Select Board Chair Stephanie Boyd and Menicocci later this month.
The main discussion point at that meeting may be the future of the READI Committee — specifically whether it should continue as an advisory committee to the Select Board as it was conceived (and then called the DIRE Committee) in the summer of 2020.
Dixon said that in its current capacity, the panel is not being heard.
"I feel like we've been underutilized and swept under the rug," she said. "[The committee] is needed, but I don't know if it's wanted."
Art, who reiterated that he is "agnostic" on the question of whether READI should fall under the purview of the Select Board or town manager, said that the diversity committee has accomplished a lot in the last six years, even if it was, at times, swimming upstream.
"I think it was wanted, and there may be different reasons why it was wanted by different people," said Art, the lone remaining member of the original Diversity, Inclusion and Racial Equity Committee. "One reason may have been that the issues that came before DIRE were difficult, extremely difficult issues to work through, and they were the kind of discussions that never could have been handled by the Select Board.
"I think it was appreciated there was a venue for that, even by people who weren't going to take up the charge to advocate for those issues themselves. There was an appreciation that that work was being done and they didn't have to do it, for some people."
Smalls joined Dixon in expressing frustration at how the Select Board historically has listened to the advisory committee it created. And he said that perhaps it would be easier for the READI Committee to work with an individual, the town manager, as opposed to the five-person board.
"The strength of the committee here, as it stands today, seems to be this opportunity for a public audience," Smalls said. "It's a platform. People can come if they have an issue. They can say things out loud. If there is no requirement on any of the other town professionals to implement anything we say, then it's really dependent on social currency.
"They do get elected. And us presenting what our recommendations are and however they receive them and however they respond to them is the kind of transaction. Then they're on the public stage, and they're being given the recommendations that have been carefully developed, whatever they are, and they can decide how they want to go forward and represent themselves. And then the public can see that and decide how they want to support those people."
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