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A Higher Quality of Life

Two weeks ago [“Do More with Less”], you read why lowering taxes in Clinton is imperative. Some believe doing so is impossible or irresponsible.

Municipal government and public schools must adjust to economic reality. This can be accomplished without degrading public service, while improving education quality.

We must reset mindsets to trim spending. The annual ritual of nickel-and-diming line items never works. That inevitably results in spending increases, when all other factors demand decreases. We’ll start by requiring agencies to roll back operations budgets to 2013 levels, if not in one year, over two or three. This will force cross-agency collaboration to restructure, share resources, and eliminate duplication.

We must right-size to reflect restructuring, and renegotiate contracts with unions and vendors to reflect cuts in state aid and conflicting tax, development, demographic, and school enrollment trends.

We must regionalize to share resources across town borders and eliminate duplication to solve our mutual expense and state aid cut problems.

Clinton’s school enrollment decline is projected to accelerate. It’s time to better-manage expectations about school budgets. If we continue, and Education budgets increase two percent (as in the past five years) as enrollment declines more than two percent annually, per-pupil costs will soar 26 percent to more than $24,000 per pupil in just five years.

There’s no measurable correlation between per-pupil costs and performance. Forcing families to over-pay for K-12 education makes saving for college and retirement challenging. Parents have a right to demand better education quality for less cost; there’s no good excuse for anything less.

Defeating budgets at referendum is a poor substitute for leadership that delivers a higher quality of life at a lower cost to taxpayers. Clinton deserves better choices that Phil Sengle and I embody. I encourage your readers to vote for us on Nov. 7.

Kirk Carr

Clinton

Kirk Carr is the Republican candidate for first selectman.