The agenda for next month’s meeting sits taped to the door of a town hall that used to fill three long tables. Now it lists five items and a quorum problem: the planning commission needs five voting members and has three. Two seats have been vacant for over a year. The town clerk has posted the openings on the municipal website, mentioned them in the local newsletter, and asked around at the diner. Nobody has applied.
This is happening in small towns and mid-sized suburbs across the country, quietly enough that it rarely makes news until a project stalls because the board can’t legally vote on it. Zoning boards, planning commissions, library trustees, parks and recreation committees, historic preservation panels — the unglamorous machinery of local government runs on volunteers, and the volunteers are getting harder to find.
The Jobs Nobody Applies For
There’s a strange symmetry between this and the paid labor market. An earlier piece on this site examined why some job postings sit open for months — roles that exist on paper but were never structured to actually get filled. Civic volunteer seats have a cousin problem, minus the salary that might otherwise compensate for the hassle. Nobody is stringing residents along with a fake posting. The seat is real, the need is real, and the town would genuinely welcome an applicant. It’s just that almost no one wants the job once they understand what it involves.
What it involves, typically: unpaid evenings, sometimes two or three a month. Reading dense packets of site plans, variance requests, and municipal code sections that were written by lawyers for other lawyers. Sitting through public comment periods where a resident, furious about a proposed fence height or a new gas station, treats the volunteer board member like a personal antagonist. Occasionally being recognized at the grocery store by someone still upset about a vote from eight months back.
Compare that to the return: no pay in most jurisdictions, or a token stipend that doesn’t cover the gas money. No staff support beyond a part-time clerk juggating six other boards. No real recognition beyond a line in the minutes. It is, in the most literal sense, a bad deal — the kind of role that exists only because someone has to do it and, for a long time, someone reliably did.
Why the Well Is Running Dry
A few forces seem to be converging. Working hours have crept later and less predictable for a large share of the workforce, especially in retail, healthcare, and logistics — the exact sectors where evening meeting attendance used to be easiest to negotiate around a shift schedule. Commutes have lengthened in many metro-adjacent towns, which eats into the evening window when meetings are usually held. And the pool of people who might once have filled these seats — retirees, especially — has itself changed shape, with more retirees relocating away from the towns where they built their working lives, taking their institutional memory and free time with them.
There’s also a less measurable shift in appetite. Local governance, in many places, has gotten more contentious and more visible than it used to be. Zoning fights over accessory dwelling units, disputes about affordable housing mandates, arguments over short-term rental rules — these used to be sleepy procedural matters. Now they often arrive at meetings with organized opposition, public records requests, and occasionally a video clip that circulates locally for a week. Volunteering for a seat that used to mean quietly approving fence permits can now mean becoming, briefly, a target. Fewer people are eager to sign up for that exposure in exchange for nothing.
Add to this a longer-running decline in civic and associational participation that predates any recent political moment — membership in service clubs, unions, religious congregations, and neighborhood associations has been trending down for a couple of decades in many communities, and planning commissions draw from the same shrinking well of people who see local, unpaid civic work as part of being a resident rather than an optional extra.
What Happens When the Seats Stay Empty
The consequences aren’t abstract. A board without quorum can’t hold a legal vote, which means development applications, permit appeals, and zoning changes back up on a shelf. Projects that would otherwise take sixty days can stretch to six months, not because anyone is dragging their feet, but because there’s no one legally empowered to say yes or no. Builders and homeowners alike absorb the delay, sometimes in the form of carrying costs on a project that can’t break ground.
Some towns have responded by consolidating boards — folding a defunct historic commission into the planning board’s agenda, for instance — which solves the quorum problem but concentrates decision-making in fewer hands and thins out the range of perspective a separate board was meant to provide. Others have started offering modest stipends where state law allows it, treating what used to be pure volunteerism as a small part-time job. A handful have shortened meeting formats or moved them online to lower the time cost, with mixed results; remote meetings tend to draw more public comment from people who wouldn’t have driven to town hall, which can make meetings longer rather than shorter.
A Case for the Unglamorous Seat
There’s an argument, made quietly by clerks and longtime board members, that these seats matter more than their unglamorous reputation suggests. Zoning and planning decisions shape what a town looks like in twenty years — where housing goes, whether a corridor stays walkable or becomes a strip of parking lots, whether a historic block survives a teardown. Library trustees decide what gets funded when budgets tighten. Parks committees decide whether the town’s one usable field gets resurfaced or a walking trail gets built instead. None of it is dramatic in the moment. Most of it is only visible in retrospect, in the shape of a town that either grew with some intention behind it or didn’t.
Filling the seat doesn’t require expertise, in most cases — commissions are generally staffed by residents, not professionals, precisely so ordinary judgment gets a say in decisions that affect ordinary life. It requires showing up, reading the packet, and being willing to sit through an argument about a fence. Towns running short on applicants are, in effect, running short on residents willing to do something that offers no reward beyond the fact that somebody has to.
