From staff reports

Town meeting is scheduled to start in 20 minutes and the going is not good.

Snow is piling in the driveway on a frigid, late winter morning, and you're fighting a cold to boot.

No problem.

Just tune into your local access channel and fire up your laptop. You'll catch the moderator's opening comments with minutes to spare -- and without leaving the comfort of your living room couch.

Welcome to town meeting in the 21st century.

Farfetched?

Not at all.

This is the age of high-speed Internet connections, interactive television and high-definition picture quality.

Television coverage of municipal board meetings, mostly taped, over local access channels has become routine in many communities.

Web streaming is nothing unusual.

"I think the technology to do it is there," said Scott W. Russell, Colby College computer science instructor. "The question is, do people have confidence in the process and we can't say with 100 percent certainty if it is secure."

The same reservations, though, were doubtlessly said about making purchases over the Internet, yet that practice becomes more common by the day, despite the computer fraud that has occurred.

Stay tuned then.

Virtual town meetings might be available in your community one day. For now, though, consider the views of those most intimately involved with town meetings.

PARTICIPATION

Maine has one of the highest voter participation rates in the country, said Mike Starn of the Maine Municipal Association, a resource and lobbying group for towns and cities in the state.

In the last presidential election, Maine ranked fourth in the nation, with 73.1 percent of eligible voters going to the polls, according to the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

One reason for this, Starn said, is that residents are allowed to register and vote the same day.

The federal government also has made efforts to make voting easier for its citizens.

One goal of The Help America Vote Act, said Don Cookson of the Maine secretary of state's office (the agency that supervises elections), was to make voting more accessible for those with disabilities.

Likewise, the ability to vote absentee in a ballot election is a method used to help increase voting numbers, and in Maine that method is particularly liberal.

"We have broadly expanded absentee voting in this state," Starn said. "It used to be you had to have a reason (to vote absentee). That is no longer the case. If you decide that is the way you want to vote, you can do so."

Updating town meetings to the Internet age can be seen as a new-age version of absentee voting, the latest step in the effort to promote as much participation as possible.

"Municipalities have the freedom to conduct (town meetings) in whatever way they see fit," Cookson said. "Of course, one of their goals is to make them as accessible as possible."

J.P. Fortier, station director of Mt. Blue TV in Farmington, said he has been televising taped versions of local government meetings, including town meeting, for years.

Fortier said limited money would make it difficult for him to televise Farmington's town meeting live.

But given no financial restraints, the technology is available to do live telecasts and has been for about 20 years, he said.

The interactive component also is doable, he said.

A Web site could be set up for voting, and the town could request that those eligible to vote submit a user name and password to validate their identity.

John Gregory, executive director of information technology at the University of Maine, said the town would have to set up individual accounts with residents to create those user names and passwords.

While not technically difficult, Gregory said the process is labor intensive and thus a drain on resources in that respect.

Televising live through local access can be problematic, as well. Typically, a local access operation has its live feed equipment housed at its studio.

Local access also has clear limitations. A resident would have to have cable access and live within the subscriber area to get the telecast.

Yet local access is not the only option for tuning into town meeting.

"Imagine, if you will, if money was no object," Fortier said. "You could stream this thing live online."

Under that scenario, "snow birds" who spend town meeting season in Florida could grab a laptop, find a comfortable spot under a palm tree and weigh in on every warrant article.

Gregory said streaming town meetings probably would require two cameras, a computer and a server. The server would be the biggest expense, likely about $4,000, he said.

A blog could be set up on the town Web site, so that remote town meeting participants could weigh in on debates and discussion. Their comments could even be projected on a screen for those on site to see.

SECURITY

Starn realizes that virtual participation in town meetings is achievable in a technological sense.

Still, he said, other hurdles might have to be cleared.

"There is a whole series of state laws," he said, "that give guidance to towns as to how they run their town meeting or special town meeting or whatever ... There would have to be some tweaking of the language if you were to do it on a Web page."

Tweaking, though, is by definition making minor changes, and thus hardly constitutes an insurmountable obstacle.

The bigger problem to scale, the No. 1 concern by far, is security.

"The question," Starn said, "is can (virtual participation in town meeting) be structured in a way that it can be safeguarded from fraud."

Cookson said concern over online fraud is one of today's great issues.

"That is one of the problems inherent in anything that is Internet based," he said. "How do you make it safe and secure? How do can make it be certain there is no possibility for tampering?"

Deputy Secretary of State John Smith said online voting, while intriguing to many, is viewed with great skepticism because of those security concerns.

To make it work for statewide or national elections, he said, the state would have to create a centralized voter registration system that could be accessed online in real time.

Russell has expertise in information security, and what he's learned is no system is fail-safe.

"There are ways to give people user IDs or passwords to ensure that only people who are citizens of a town can vote," he said. "The big issue is whether the vote is recorded accurately. It's hard to prevent someone from installing a program on somebody's computer to alter that person's vote."

China Town Manager Dan L'Heureux understands security concerns exist. But he also has personally benefited from online interactive technology.

"I've take grad courses where the teachers are at Orono and I'm in Augusta, and there is interaction," he said. "The technology is there."

Thus, he is open to the idea of adding a virtual component to town meetings.

"From my perspective," he said, "I'm open to anything to increase participation."

TRADITION

Others, though, say not so fast to virtual town meetings.

Farmington lawyer H. Paul Mills moderates about six town or special meetings a year and has done so for more than a decade.

He is a self-confessed proponent of this quintessential form of democracy.

Mills remembers when Farmington town meetings were televised live over local access for a few years in the 1990s.

Nowadays, he said, the meeting is televised on a taped basis -- and he prefers that approach.

"I think it's better taped," he said, "because it encourages more people to come to the meeting."

There also is the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" argument.

Albion Town Clerk Amanda Dow said between 100 and 150 residents attend the town's annual meeting.

"I think Albion likes the old-fashioned way," she said. "I think people like to come out to (town meetings)."

Mills, too, considers the status quo as healthy and vibrant.

He recalls a nasty weather day about three years ago when towns across the region postponed their town meeting.

The town of Industry, he said, was one of the exceptions and its fortitude was rewarded.

"Industry had one of its biggest turnouts," Mills said. "People showed their community spirit. Everybody has a four-wheel-drive vehicle or a pickup truck or a neighbor who has one."

Turnout aside, there also is the real-life town meeting experience to consider, Mills argues.

"The process of town meeting is a very open, give-and-take, interactive process," he said. "You certainly have a way of evaluating people's demeanors when you see them face-to-face. Negotiation often takes place at town meeting, and there's something authentic to that kind of process."

Colin Hickey -- 861-9205

chickey@centralmaine.com