On Wednesday, at their final session of the season, Town Meeting voted to prohibit the sale of single-serve water bottles, ban toxic rodenticides known as SGARs, officially recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and approve funding for the Battle of Lexington 250th anniversary celebration. They voted against a petition to allow 16- and 17-year-old residents to vote in municipal elections.
Town Meeting had a lengthy discussion of a citizen’s petition to ban the sale of single-serve plastic water bottles within Lexington, ultimately voting in favor of the law by a wide margin.
The ban will take effect on Jan. 1, 2025. This gives businesses eight months to comply, though some members raised concern that this was not enough, or that insufficient outreach had been done.
“Our small businesses deserve better than being cut off at the knees and forced into a situation without any way to have input in the process,” said Avrim Baskin from Precinct 2.
Others disagreed that this was unreasonable.
“This is not a surprise to businesses,” said Mark Andersen of Precinct 9. “You would have to be an ostrich not to realize we have climate change. Any business owner is thinking about the fact that they have to discontinue plastics.”
Cynthia Arens of Precinct 3 encouraged businesses to view this as an opportunity to focus on generating revenue through the goods and services they take pride in.
“I want our businesses to succeed at what they do best—making pizzas and cakes and subs,” Arens said, “not selling plastic water bottles.”
The meeting also featured speeches from several members of the Diamond Middle School Green Team.
“In our school cafeteria, plastic water bottles are sold, and they often end up littering our grounds,” 8th grader Sophia Trazitski said. “At our last litter cleanup, we found a lot of plastic water bottles.”
Town Counsel Mina Makarious noted that the law would not necessarily ban the distribution of plastic water bottles in the school cafeteria, but it would ban them from being sold in vending machines.
The law will be enforced by Lexington’s Department of Public Health. It will be added to standard inspections for restaurants, and enforcement for other businesses will be complaint-based, said Joanne Belanger, the Director of Public Health.
In another win for environmentalists, the use of second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides (SGARs), the most commonly used rodenticide, will no longer be permitted on Town property.
SGARs induce internal bleeding in rodents, which kills them slowly—often over the course of several days. Wildlife and pets who consume the rodents are often harmed or killed by the poison. It has been described as inhumane and dangerous.
“One of the saddest things I’ve read in the past 5 years [as an editor] was an obituary by a local birder about MK, an eagle who nested by one of the lakes. She was poisoned by SGAR, spent 36 hours suffering and having seizures, and died,” said Meg Muckenhoupt of Precinct 1.
“I hope we’re nearly unanimous on this,” said Jessie Steigerwald from Precinct 8. They were—just one person voted no, and one person abstained.
In another overwhelmingly positive vote, the Town of Lexington will now officially celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day, not Columbus Day, on the second Monday of every October.
In doing so, Lexington is joining a list of dozens of other towns that have already begun to commemorate this day. Fran Ludwig, one of the proponents of the article, hopes that this momentum is moving toward state recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
“By celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we’re saying that the people who lived here before Lexington was founded deserve to be celebrated and remembered,” said Tewentenhawitha Maracle, a young Lexington resident and member of the Turtle Clan within the Mohawk Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy “We can learn about their contributions to art, science, and the environment, and most importantly, learn to stand up to racism.”
Multiple Town Meeting speakers linked this bill to the environmental focus of other articles in the session.
“As we take care of the environment, we need to look to people that know how to better care for the land,” said Ricki Pappo from Precinct 2. “We are going to give this day as a thank you to the Indigenous People who have been a part of this land and then ignored and not recognized for many many years.”
Ludwig also framed it as historically centered: “In Lexington we are so interested in history. In the interest of that, we want to acknowledge that we are on Indigenous land.”
The bill did not set aside any funding for celebratory events on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, but some town meeting members expressed openness to doing so in the future.
The Semiquincentennial Commission, tasked with planning the Battle of Lexington and Concord’s 250th anniversary commemoration, requested $500,000 for a series of celebratory events. These will include multiple reenactments, a parade, and a promotional event for Ken Burns’ 12-hour documentary The American Revolution.
Town Meeting approved the funding without a single question or comment.
A citizen petition to lower the municipal election voting age to 16 failed narrowly, by a margin of 71-74 (with 13 abstentions).
A few Town Meeting members who supported the petition drew parallels between youth voting restrictions and those against other marginalized groups.
“I think we should refrain from making judgements about how students are influenced in how they would vote,” Andersen said, pointing out that similar arguments were made for women’s suffrage.
Precinct 7 representative Benjamin Lees said that when people suggest teens don’t have enough of a stake in local issues, it was akin to prior justification for limiting voting to property owners. Multiple members also emphasized that many teens are politically engaged, for example through involvement in Lexington committees, and that they receive civics education as mandated in Massachusetts.
Opponents of the bill expressed concerns that 16- and 17-year-olds were too immature to vote thoughtfully.
Furthermore, there was doubt about the bill’s ability to proceed: “We have about half a dozen home rule petitions waiting to get approved,” said Robert Avallone from Precinct 8. “We don’t need to add more, especially because similar ones haven’t been approved. We don’t need to do this to make ourselves feel good if it’s not going to go anywhere.”
At least eight Massachusetts municipalities have voted to lower the voting age but have been unable to do so because the home rule petitions have been stalled in committee in the Massachusetts state legislature.
This town is lost. We have the dumbest and worst people in charge of this town. Only a matter of time before it loses its luster to outsiders. And when that happens, all the left-wing activists responsible for destroying it will move on to destroy the next town and state. That’s what they do. They have their escape plans.
Does banning water in plastic bottles promote and/or increase the consumption of sugary sodas, instead? Or are those equally banned?
Banning plastic bottles from vending machines is a safety issue. I am old enough to remember glass bottles and broken glass everywhere–it will fill the cracks of those brick sidewalks and people (especially children) will get cuts and other injuries. That is why at one time there were laws to ban glass bottles in favor of plastic bottles. Having Lexington’s Department of Public Health to enforce unsafe public health practices raises ethical and maybe some legal questions. The next safe option where one can reseal the container are the aluminum bottles with screw top lids for the well to do–that sends a second message.