Government Is a Family and Neighborly Matter for Port Tobacco’s 18 Residents
This reminds me so much of my experiences with the Green Party (although the analogy can only be taken so far, since the town is obviously — as a whole — more conservative than the Greens are). But even so, the similarities are interesting. Specifically, just how informally things are run. Here in Montgomery, the only hard and fast rules that seem to be in place are that “officers” are elected every year and that decisions are reached at by consensus (I put officers in quotes because being an officer only entitles you to make decisions if no one shows up for a meeting and allows one to sound more authoritative when speaking with the media. Although, come to think of it, I don’t think that the media have ever contacted the Montgomery Greens…)
“Folks in the town tell us, ‘This is what we have to do.’ And I say, ‘Okay,’ ” said Mayor John T.E. Hyde, technically the president of the Village Commission. “I just do what I’m told.”
Hyde, a mortician, said he is perhaps the only Democrat in Maryland’s smallest municipality (population 18), but that will not prevent him from staying in office this election spring.
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Besides, no one else wants the job. “If someone campaigned for it, I’d say, go right ahead and take it — be my guest,” Hyde said.Village Commissioner Dorothy Barbour put it this way: “We don’t work like your larger places.”
But in the verdant 60 acres of Port Tobacco, with its eight homes and one-room schoolhouse, one question always arises: Can a small town be too small?
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As the mayor of a place where nothing much happens, Hyde has developed a certain single-mindedness for what he wants to accomplish. This philosophy, he admitted, conflicts with his occasional absent-mindedness.“Before I became mayor, I wasn’t paying attention” to the town, he said. “I’m hardly paying attention now.”
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