So, my town’s council passed a budget, and nobody was very happy with it. The main problem is that the town has just re-evaluated properties after ten years or so of real estate madness (well, more than that of the madness, but ten years since the last reval), so even keeping the mill rate the same, homeowners are going to have a big tax increase. Also, it’s an aging town, like many places in New England; there are lots of elderly homeowners who are on fixed incomes, and some of them are a bit distant from what the real expenses of running a town like this are. The town council cut almost two million dollars from the proposed school budget, which led to screams from those of us who have kids in the system, but the tax hike was still pretty big. Anyway, an anti-tax group got enough signatures on a petition to have a referendum on the budget, and we had an election, and the vote was overwhelmingly against the budget. More or less eight thousand against to three thousand for, out of nearly thirty-seven thousand registered voters.
Now, I had two strong emotional reactions to the election results. First was a sense that our affluent town had abandoned the schools and services they could afford out of pure selfishness. The second was a sense that a smallish minority of misguide zealots had hijacked the process. Sadly, the two reactions are logically inconsistent. If it is, in fact, only eight out of thirty-seven voters, less than one out of four, who want a lower-tax, lower-service town, then the town as a whole has not exhibited selfishness. If the vote really does represent the feeling of the rest of the town, then the anti-tax gang didn’t hijack the process at all. On the other hand, two-thirds or so of the town didn’t bother to vote, which is a kind of selfishness in itself.
One of my frustrations is that so few people in the public sphere are making the case for a high-tax high-service community. I understand that there are problems with it—a lot of money going through Town Hall means a lot of money wasted, and a fair amount of corruption, too. And as the town grows (which, thank the Lord, it does, because towns either grow or die, at this point in our civilization), maintaining a high-service town means not only keeping taxes high but continuing to raise them. But I am willing to do that, in order to keep the services. The schools, of course, which are very expensive and still could make good use of more money, but also the garbage hauling and curbside recycling, the police and fire squads, the libraries the senior centers, the parks and pools, the concerts and classes, the parades and parking spaces, the inspections and negotiations, the planning and planting.
That’s even more frustrating because the anti-tax people are not really making the case for a low-tax low-service town. That is, they push the low-tax part, but they imply, most often, that taxes can be kept down without diminishing the services. And we could certainly reduce our services. Shorter hours at the libraries and rec centers. Fewer classes, or higher fees for them, or both. And, of course, there are the schools. These are arguments that have substance, and I see that people of good will must differ on them because they differ in their vision of what a good town will be. But the idea that we can have a low-tax high-service town by cutting out administrative fat is ridiculous. I don’t mean that there is no fat, I mean that you can’t have a working town government with no fat. I suppose, if you spent a really large amount of money on constantly examining the administration for signs of fat, you might be able to keep it at a very low level, but then you’ve got a high-tax, low-service government, which isn’t a good idea.
Also, before I accept any argument from an anti-tax activist that the government entity in question can reduce taxes by getting more money from another government entity, that activist must show that he or she has been pushing to increase revenues at that other level. If you want us to keep our town taxes down by getting (mythical) money from the state, you’d better want to pay more state taxes, right? Because money doesn’t come from nowhere.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.