Numbers, numbers everywhere, nor any drop to drink

Your Humble Blogger lives in a smallish suburb of a biggish city of a wealthy state. There are certain rules imposed on us by the state, which include (a) the requirement to tax residential property at a single mill rate across the town (with another mill rate for all commercial and industrial properties), rather than allowing either a progressive tax structure or a neighborhood rate, and (2) the ability to force a referendum on the budget with quite a small number of signatures (6% of registered voters, in our case). Since people generally do not like to have their taxes raised, this year (like last year), we will be having a referendum on the town budget, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a majority of voters (but a minority of residents) oppose the budget.

I support the budget. There are half-a-dozen reasons I support it, from my preference for high-tax high-service municipalities to a general distaste for referenda, but I don’t think that my more general reasons will be persuasive, particularly in a conversation that begins with accusations (on the No! side) of waste, fraud and abuse, which could be magically done away with if we only vote against them.

The proposed budget for our town is $215,779,968; the proposed budget for the school district is $124,884,718 which is an increase of 6.02% over last year’s budget of $117,796,851. It seems to me preposterous that we would have a tax increase of less than 4%, that is, that we would be able to cut $6 million from the proposed budget, without taking a lot of it from the schools.

The increase in dollar terms is $7,087,867. Of that, the cost for transportation has gone up $890,547, and that isn’t really negotiable. The increase is sudden, but that’s because we had in the past negotiated an excellent deal that ended with the past fiscal year; we’re getting back to current market rates. Our heating costs went up by $516,012; that’s potentially negotiable, but I suspect is already a tad lowball. At any rate, the cost of oil and gas is pretty much taking up $1.4 million, or 20% of that increase, and we don’t really have any choice but to suck it up and pay, right? I mean, we need to be budgeting for huge increases in our domestic oil-and-gas budgets, and I don’t see any way to get around that.

Then there’s the health insurance. It goes up, in the proposed budget, by 2,098,625, which is an increase of 13% or so over last year, and that stinks, but again, I don’t think we can do anything about it in the budget. Maybe we could elect people who could appoint better negotiators, but I don’t think that’s realistic, and besides, it wouldn’t turn up in this year’s budget. We’re now up to $3.4 million that is just inflation in the areas where inflation is expected to be particularly bad.

Then there are the salaries. The increase in all the salaries across the school comes to $3,924,179. If we include all of that, we’re up to $7.3 of the $7 million increase. In other words, other than salaries, oil-and-gas and health insurance, the school budget has been cut. But fine, salaries is a big category, and includes all that administrative waste, fraud and abuse, like giving principals a 4% raise or nurses a 3% raise. Just counting teachers ($2,257,603 increase) and paraprofessionals (who are mostly in classrooms and libraries, as I understand it) ($366,040 increase), that’s another 37% of the increase accounted for.

Why so much? It’s because we are starting to successfully retain teachers. That means they get seniority and more pay. That’s certainly an area where the budget could be tightened. If we were lousy at teacher retention, and lost more of our teachers to nearby towns or other careers after a few years, we would save money. But tightening that budget is fundamentally incompatible with keeping good teachers in classrooms, and there we are.

The rest of the town budget is similar: salaries going up $1.5 million, benefits another $1.5 million for two-thirds of the $4.5 million increase. I suspect that there could be some savings—there was a letter to the editor in this morning’s Hartford Courant in which Robert Goodman complained about the Town planting flowers, which certainly costs money. I like beautification projects, myself, particularly when they involve a few flowers here and there, but these are legitimate subjects for discussion.

But there is no way we’re going to make up for ten million dollars more due in oil and gas and salaries and benefits by holding off on the flower planting for a year. That isn’t how it works. We could, maybe, close it up by selling off one of the (five) parks to developers, or by closing up one of the (two) senior centers, but that’s not being discussed. Which is fine with me. I like the parks and senior centers, and when it comes down to it, I’m willing to help pay for them. I doubt I have to convince many Gentle Readers of that—y’all may well prefer to live in low-tax, low-service towns, but you don’t expect to live in low-tax high-service towns, with no waste, fraud or abuse. Or flowers.

The question is this: what will get my neighbors out to the polls next Tuesday to vote? I suspect the numbers won’t change anybody’s mind, but they also won’t help people remember to vote, nor will they make people passionate enough about it to make them remember for themselves. I suspect that when it gets down to it, most of the voters are more or less resigned to the tax increase: they understand that they have to pay for what they are getting, but they have a suspicion that if the council had been smarter or more honest or something then they wouldn’t have to pay so much. If they were forced to vote on the budget, they would vote Yes, but frankly they’d rather not think about it.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.