For those Gentle Readers who wanted to know the result of the budget referendum I was on about last week, well, the budget went down in flames. Turnout was 29%, and the final result was 65% No.
Just to tell the story as I see it, we elected a Town Council (and School Board) who have as their main job deciding what the town will do and pay for, and then we rejected the budget they came up with. And then, after we did that, we re-elected the Town Council because they were doing a good job with the budget, and then after we did that, we rejected the budget they came up with. As far as I can tell, the pressure on that Town Council to come up with some accounting shenanigans that allow them to fraudulently claim to be doing the things people elected them to do without paying for them must be immense.
Only some 19% of the registered voters came out to the polls to say no; it’s plausible that all of those people had voted against the incumbents on the Town Council, or at least against the ones who supported the budgets, and that the greater number of people who voted for the Town Council mostly stayed home and let them twist slowly, slowly in the wind. Fooey.
Mostly, I wanted to highlight one quote in the Hartford Courant’s story (which I linked to above). Daniel P. Jones quotes a 68-year-old town resident as saying about the town’s schools: “They’re just way overdoing it. ... They’re paying for a private school education with our tax money…” Are you as stunned by that quote as I am?
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
The way you put it, there’s a logical flaw in how people are voting. But you’re assuming that people are voting for Town Council members so that they can do their job, rather than the usual Town Council voting of familiarity, identity politics, and
graftreciprocal favors. The fact that the Town Council then does their job in a way that the voters don’t like is unfortunate, but probably far less important to most voters than the rest of it.Well, and the Town Council also does other things, like decide which days trash is picked up, and who gets permits for what, and where the stop signs and speed bumps go. Or at least they decide who decides those things, and people care about those a lot.
And seriously, I think that most of the no voters did not vote for the Town Council members who wound up supporting this budget, and most of the non-voters did not think of their non-vote as a no. I’m just cranky about my daughter’s school losing teachers (which may not happen, of course, but the money will come from somewhere).
Thanks,
-V.
A friend in Maine had a similar quote. A local politician who wanted to slash the school budget said, “The school board has to realize they’ve been driving a Ferrari, and we can’t keep up with the payments.” Laughable, if you know anything about the school system in Maine.
My friend went to a school board meeting and got her picture on the front page when she publicly confronted this politician and told him, “Our school system is no Ferrari. It’s a ten-year old Toyota Tercel and you won’t give us the money for an oil change.”