This section describes the GA with Select Board governance model. If you are coming from the Governance Options Primer for Community Deliberations, this section contains the expanded record behind that document's summary. Later sections discuss New England Town Meeting research, unresolved design questions, and charter implications.
The GA with Select Board model adds a continuously operating elected Select Board to Ophir's existing General Assembly system. The General Assembly remains the town's sole legislative authority, while the Select Board serves as the town's standing administrative and executive body between GA meetings.
The Select Board operates within defined administrative domains, including:
- Supervision and direction of the Town Manager
- Contracting and routine financial administration within GA-established thresholds
- Implementation of GA-adopted ordinances and policies
- Intergovernmental coordination and external liaison with USFS, San Miguel County, and other agencies
- Emergency operational response when GA action cannot be convened in time
- Administrative planning, agenda coordination, preparation of GA business, and continuity of ongoing projects between meetings
The General Assembly retains authority over all core governing decisions, including:
- All ordinance and legislative authority
- Budget adoption and supplemental appropriations
- Contracts and expenditures above charter-defined thresholds
- Land use decisions and property transactions
- Borrowing, debt issuance, and long-term financial obligations
- Charter amendments and structural governance changes
The model is derived from New England Town Meeting governance, in which a Select Board serves as the community's standing elected governing body between town meetings. In those systems, the Select Board performs governance functions that Ophir currently assigns to individual charter officers, and a separately elected mayor is generally not part of the structure. In practice, much of Ophir's between-meeting governance already occurs through staff coordination, custom, and informal consensus rather than through an explicitly authorized elected body. The Select Board formalizes that layer. Administrative and governance responsibilities currently distributed among Ophir's charter officers would be reorganized within the Select Board framework; the specific translation of existing offices is an open design question addressed in Section 4.
The Town Manager remains the town's chief administrative officer, supervising staff and managing day-to-day municipal operations under the policy direction of the General Assembly and the day-to-day supervision of the Select Board.
A central feature of this model is the separation of legislative and administrative authority. Legislative authority resides exclusively with the General Assembly, while the Select Board serves as a standing administrative and executive body operating continuously between GA sessions. This distinguishes the model from a Town Council system, where legislative authority is centralized in the council itself, and from Ophir's current structure, where no continuous elected governing body exists between assemblies to advance work or maintain institutional memory across meeting cycles.