Oh, for a little less input -- and a little more leadership.

The good people of Manchester have been called to a special town meeting next Tuesday.

We like town meeting -- it's one of the last bastions of gritty, direct citizen control of the creaking body politic. It's where taxpayers make known their often idiosyncratic notions of how gummint should work and where high drama can surround whether to buy a new hose for the volunteer fire department ("Greedy bustuhds -- didn't we just buy them one 10 years ago?").

But what's going on in Manchester is too much.

In October 2006, MCF Communications applied to the Manchester Planning Board for a permit to construct a 150-foot wireless telecommunications tower on Pelton Hill, just off Western Avenue. The spot is smack in the middle an area famous as a cellphone dead zone.

City officials denied the application because the tower's height exceeded the town's legal limit for such structures. MCF promptly sued, saying that the town's law was illegal under federal law.

After much wrangling and talking and wrassling -- known in legal lingo as "factual discovery and good-faith mediation" -- between MCF lawyers and the town's lawyer, the parties devised a settlement agreement to allow the construction of a tower in the same place, but just a little lower and a little prettier and more artfully landscaped than originally planned.

If signed by selectmen, that agreement would have meant the end of the lawsuit and would have allowed the town to reconsider the terms of its cellphone ordinance in light of the legal challenge that had just been made.

All could have ended right there, peacefully and relatively quietly. Manchester selectmen could have approved the consent agreement, the cellphone folks would have paid a portion of the town's legal fees and other expenses and life would have gone on. A new cellphone ordinance could have been proposed and adopted.

Instead, town officials took a duck. They sent the consent agreement on to the townspeople, to be voted on in a special town meeting. That counts in our book as a little too much consultation, and too little decisiveness on the part of those elected to make decisions.

Now, we know they're not paid vast sums to do the work they do. We know that standing in line anywhere in town is probably a pain for most selectboard members, because someone's always yanking their chains.

But in this case, presenting townspeople with four pages of legal mumbo jumbo and a three-page town warrant filled with "whereas" and "shalls," getting them to come out on a chilly January evening when one of them might very well slip on the ice in the town parking lot, all to take a vote on an agreement that the town's leaders had ample authority to sign themselves -- well, we just think this could have been avoided.

A simple vote by the town's leaders would have been more than appropriate and more than adequate.