Who ARE westwoodcitizens.org? Why We Invite All Westwood Voters to Attend the Special Town Meeting

 Who We Are:

Last December, within a short time frame,  Westwoodcitizens.org  gathered 344 registered voters’ signatures on a petition for a Special Town Meeting, asking the Westwood Select Board to withdraw the Town’s lawsuit against the Westwood Land Trust filed last July.

Westwoodcitizens.org is not affiliated with the Westwood Land Trust and we do not act at the behest of the Land Trust. We are independent Westwood voters. We have served on town boards and commissions from FinComm to Conservation Commission to Westwood Environmental Action and  have for many years been active in our community in other ways— as school volunteers, in community youth sports programs, COA volunteers, arts programs, PTOs, in focus groups on publicly funded town projects, in schools and at the Westwood Public Library.

We are a grass roots group that came together quickly in December because for many months, we have been unable to get any real answers from our elected officials as to the public interest  rationale for this lawsuit.

We are self-funded and we run on the skills and shoe leather of our band of volunteers. For more details on who we are and what we stand for, go to our website, https://www.westwoodcitizens.org

Why Override Indefinite Postponement And Have a Public Discussion on February 2?

The purpose of this Special Town Meeting is to have a full discussion of the issues publicly, and to vote on the four warrant articles to make requests to the Select Board. If we have no opportunity for discussion, if citizens do not debate this contested issue publicly —no matter their views or “side”—then we will have wasted a golden opportunity to engage in real-time civic discourse that makes a town a community and not simply a  place to lay our heads and park our cars when we’re not at work.

For this reason, for a civil debate in an in-person situation with clearly established Town Meeting rules, I urge all to attend the STM, vote to override the FinComm and Warrant Committee’s vote of indefinite postponement,  listen respectfully to one another, and only THEN, vote on the articles.

Let’s actually have a town meeting.