2026 Lyme Town Business Meeting – Saturday, March 14
Greetings – For those of you who are ready to mark your calendars, the Lyme Selectboard has chosen Saturday, March 14 at 9:00 am for the 2026 Lyme Town Business Meeting. As noted previously (see below and more details below), based on feedback from many, many people in Lyme through an online survey, at last year’s town meeting, and through conversations with citizens, we recommended trying a different time for the Town Business meeting in effort alleviate some of the conflicts people have had with attending in the past and based when people said they would make an effort to attend.
This March you can look forward to the following schedule:
Little Town Meeting on Tuesday, March 3 at 6:00 pm– Meet the candidates, discuss zoning amendments and other articles on the ballot for all-day voting
School District Meeting on Thursday, March 5 – Discuss and vote on the School Budget
Town Election Day on Tuesday March 10 – polls open from 7am to 7pm for voting on town officers, zoning amendments, and specific types of warrant articles
Town Business Meeting on Saturday, March 14 – Discuss and vote on the Town Budget and many, many warrant articles. Find out who the Lyme Citizen of the Year is.
Please stay tuned for more information between now and then on subjects like filing to run for office and the dates of budget hearings that help shape the budgets (Town and School) you will vote on in March.
Thanks for your time – now and in March,
Mark Schiffman, Town Moderator
Emily Shepard, Town Clerk
If anyone is curious to see the results of the recent survey of Lyme citizens, you can find that here: https://www.lymenh.gov/home/news/results-survey-about-town-meeting
Again, thank you to everyone who responded to the survey. We were really pleased to hear from SO many people. And we heard both from people who regularly attend Town Meeting and people who never have or seldom can. If you look at the survey results, you will see those presented collectively as well as parsed into those categories. Many other people reached out to me or Emily to share their thoughts outside the survey. And as I noted, we also asked about this at Town Meeting last year.
As we guessed, there is no magical time or date that would work perfectly for everyone, but we really want to thank everyone who shared the sentiment that they wanted the meeting time to work for as many people as possible.
Here are some quick bullets on what we found out
- For people who frequently attend town meeting, 9 am on the second Tuesday in March works just fine.
- But the vast majority of those people are also very willing to come another day/time.
- Meetings during the workday are a big issue for many people – for some, meeting between 9-5 during the week is almost impossible.
- Meetings at night can run up against dinner time, family time, and/or driving dark hours, the last of which is a concern for older residents who don’t stay up late or drive at night.
- A meeting on a weekend is a concern for some, particularly as it can conflict with planned activities and other commitments, especially for families with children participating in sports.
- A meeting in the late afternoon/early evening did not seem to solve the problems/challenges for enough people.
- Some people would really like the Town Meeting and School District Meeting to be back-to-back, but when we surveyed people, we found that given the actual logistics of making that happen, and how much time people would need to commit, it might have an overall negative effect on attendance – driving down the attendance at one meeting or the other vs. pumping up the attendance at both. But perhaps this could come back on the table in the future.
As a result of all these inputs and running some comparisons regarding which options gained more people and which seemed to lower expected attendance – for both the whole group responding and the sub-classifications noted above, Emily Shepard and I proposed to the Selectboard that for this year, we try the Business Meeting on a Saturday morning, if possible wrapping in Little Town Meeting.
Personally, I can say that if you had asked me before this process started, that was not the answer I expected to end up with, but after this survey, talking to people, and reviewing advantages and disadvantages, it very much seems to be the best choice for this coming year.
Meeting on Saturday morning not only received the most positive/likely responses, but also has some additional advantages over the “traditional” meeting timing.
So, will this make everyone happy? Of course not, but for those for whom this is not a first choice, we appreciate your flexibility, and for those who indicated this option remove previous conflicts, we hope you will put it on your calendar and plan to be there. Between now and then, we’ll have more information to share and hope to work with community groups to make the most of the morning’s gathering.
While the Secretary of State’s office had previously indicated the Town Business Meeting could occur before or after Election Day, Town Counsel advised that the Business Meeting should occur on or after Election Day, and as a result we revised our recommended day for the meeting to Saturday, March 14 – which is one of the most popular days for this meeting in other towns in New Hampshire
We look forward to seeing you all then – as well as many times between now and then!