The Town of Brookline is run by a 5 member Select Board, 255 Town Meeting Members, an elected Moderator, and many boards and commissions. The challenge many people face is knowing what the people elected or appointed to run our town actually do, who they are, how they vote, and what they believe.
Transparent Brookline has aimed to compile and present publicly available information in a consolidated, digestible way. You shouldn't need to dig through a dozen pages of the Brookline web site to find an email address for your elected representatives, or open a half dozen PDFs to know what Town Meeting decided last May, and how your Town Meeting Members and Select Board Members voted. The site was founded in May 2019 by, and continues to be operated by, Jeff Wachter, Brookline resident in Precinct 7. While not every aspect of the site are up to date, the lists of precinct Town Meeting Members and their email addresses are current as of November 2022.
As this web site continues to grow and add information, our aim is to be a resource for all things Brookline local government and politics: making it easy to find not just Town Meeting Member contact information and recorded votes, but voting and candidate information; endorsements from various grassroots (and some more established) local organizations; warrant article recommendations from the Green Caucus, social justice organizations, and others; public meeting announcements and the Town Hall calendar; and more. All of this is intended to make local government as easy to access, influence, and lobby, as possible.
In the spirit of the traditional New England form of Town Meeting governance, where every citizen can contribute, if you'd like to help with this project, please reach out to transparentbrookline@gmail.com. We're also always open to feedback of all sorts: if you see something you believe to be inaccurate, incomplete, or simply inappropriate, please reach out as well.