But some question time spent on areas beyond their control

By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff, Globe Correspondent, 3/2/2003

hen Lincoln Town Meeting convenes later this month, voters will be considering mostly local concerns on the warrant, from another Proposition 21/2 override request to property tax relief for senior citizens. But a few items on the agenda will transcend the usual fare.

Lincoln voters, as they deliberate over meaty local issues, also will be asked to weigh in on more global matters, over which the town has virtually no control.

Hands will go up or down on resolutions opposing a war with Iraq, criticizing the World Trade Organization's position on water rights, and urging the federal government to rein in perceived excesses of the USA Patriot Act, the sweeping law intended to expand the government's ability to hunt down terrorists.

Other communities are taking a similarly literal interpretation of an old axiom: ''Think globally, act locally.''

The Newton aldermen entered the Iraq debate last fall, when, after sifting through garden-variety zoning variances and license applications, it formally urged President Bush and Congress to avoid a war. After a passionate debate that seemed more fitting for the UN Security Council, the board voted 20 to 4 to approve the symbolic measure.

Scores of US communities, and several in Massachusetts, including Cambridge, Brookline, and Somerville, have taken similar stands on the prospects of war.

It's not unheard of for city and town governments to wade into national and global affairs from time to time. During the Reagan era, many communities urged the United States and Soviet Union to freeze nuclear weapons stockpiles.

Marlborough even passed an ordinance in 1982 that banned the ''dropping of nuclear or similar bombs ... within city limits.'' (Violators were to be fined a sum ''equivalent to the value of damages caused,'' it said.)

But as Lincoln prepares to debate war, water rights, and terrorism, and as Watertown next month considers its annual resolution calling on Turkey to acknowledge a massacre of Armenians in the early 1900s, some people in the western suburbs are likely to debate another question: Are these appropriate discussions for local government?

Brooke K. Lipsitt, the president of the Newton Board of Aldermen and the sponsor of the resolution opposing a war in Iraq, said the answer is an emphatic yes.

''A city does not exist in a vacuum,'' said Lipsitt, who was elected in 1991 after heading a grass-roots group that got the city to pass nuclear freeze resolutions. ''City lines are marks on a map. We are part of a region and a country and a world that gets smaller and smaller all the time.''

Even if one sets aside questions about potential casualties or the morality of a preemptive strike, Lipsitt said, an invasion of Iraq would hurt Newton residents because it would divert billions of dollars in federal aid from the cities to the military. Newton is already struggling to balance its budget in the face of Governor Mitt Romney's $114 million cut in state aid in the fiscal year that ends June 30.

''We do not go to war around the world without that cost coming from somewhere,'' Lipsitt said. ''That's why this is a significant local issue.''

But Newton Alderman Richard Lipof, who opposed the Iraq resolution, said such votes are self-serving and meaningless. ''I want to avoid war at all costs,'' he said. But board members have no expertise in foreign affairs, he said, and it was wrong of Lipsitt to force them to take a stand.

The Iraq resolution resonated on a personal level for Lipof. A generation ago, he said, his father, Michael Lipof, then an alderman himself, would come home exhausted at 2 in the morning after the board had wrangled for hours over resolutions calling for an end to the Vietnam War.

''He'd say, `We talked about stuff that we had absolutely no control over,''' Lipof recalled.

Newton Alderwoman Amy Mah Sangiolo said she voted against Lipsitt's resolution for similar reasons. Though she signed an antiwar letter that Lipsitt sent to the state's US senators, Sangiolo rejected Lipsitt's resolution after a dozen residents told her ''we didn't vote for you to espouse opinions'' on international affairs.

Although local resolutions are strictly advisory, proponents say that they can influence the decisions of US leaders and also take the pulse of a community.

Indeed, Metrowest Partners for a Just and Peaceful World, an activist group in the western suburbs that is sponsoring a measure at the Framingham Town Meeting opposing the USA Patriot Act, believes it is crucial for local voters to weigh in.

But is anyone paying any attention to the formal votes on global issues cast in the suburbs?

US Representative James P. McGovern, a Worcester Democrat who represents several Globe West communities, said it is important that local communities are involved in debates about worldly events, especially when the stakes are high.

''Look, town meetings should be a place to talk about everything, including local and world issues,'' said McGovern, who voted against going to war. ''I am grateful that people are engaged.''

With the resolutions opposing a war in Iraq, many of the sponsors are veterans of the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s.

Lincoln approved a half-dozen such measures during the Reagan years, according to Sarah Cannon Holden, one of the leaders of the Lincoln Waging Peace Coalition, which brought the nuclear freeze questions to the annual Town Meeting.

Holden said some critics contended - as they do now with other issues - that Lincoln residents lacked the expertise to debate the arcana of the comparative nuclear arms stockpiles of the United States and Soviet Union.

That's nonsense, she said.

''Do you need to be an expert on nuclear weapons to know what's right and wrong?'' she said. ''I don't think so. From my way of thinking, the use of nuclear weapons is totally unacceptable under any circumstances.''

Given Lincoln's record on the nuclear freeze resolutions, the town appears likely to approve the measure opposing a war in Iraq at the Town Meeting on March 29. More than 110 cities, towns, and counties - and one state legislature, Maine's - have approved such resolutions, according to the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, a nonpartisan group helping to organize municipal campaigns against the war.

Many of the communities that have passed the measures have liberal leanings, such as Berkeley, Calif.; Madison, Wis.; and Santa Fe, N.M. But others, like Des Moines, have large numbers of Republican voters.

Meanwhile, with considerably less fanfare, conservatives are mounting a countermovement to the antiwar resolutions on the state level.

Grover G. Norquist, the president of the Washington-based Americans for Tax Reform, has sent every state senate and house a resolution supporting an invasion of Iraq as ''wise and good,'' he said. So far the measure has passed the South Carolina Legislature and a chamber in each of the legislatures of Georgia, Oklahoma, Hawaii, and Colorado.

Unlike some local opponents of symbolic resolutions, Norquist, a native of Weston, said it's perfectly appropriate for cities, counties, and states to take a stand on international matters.

''This isn't France, where the establishment makes life-and-death decisions independent of anyone else,'' he said.

Apart from seeking an endorsement of Bush's foreign policy, he said, his group views the votes by state legislators on the war resolution as potential political ammunition.

''Three or five years from now, these guys are going to be running for Congress,'' he said. ''Now they'll have a vote on foreign policy on record that can be used to elect them or to defeat them.''

Globe correspondent Lauren Bobrowich contributed to this report. Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com.

This story ran on page W1 of the Globe West section on 3/2/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

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