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Top-Down Budget Supervision

In his book The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt explores the polarization of politics and how good people can disagree so disagreeably. Certainly that is a subject that could be studied each year at referendum time in Clinton.

There are good people who believe the town’s reputation will suffer if perpetual education budgets increases keep getting defeated year-after-year even as enrollment declines and state funding evaporates. There are others who believe public safety and public works are at risk if taxes don’t go up every year even if the population is not growing or prospering. And there are some who will use budget increase defeats as an excuse to needlessly cut services and education programs as an object lesson to those with the temerity to champion voting “No” and to those for whom voting “No” is an act of self-preservation.

None of this is particularly constructive.

Now that the dust has settled we have seven months until all of this inanity starts again and budgets are being formed the way they have always been formed: from the bottom-up, indifferent to the means of the tax base to absorb more and more taxes.

For eight of the last nine years, one or both budgets have been defeated at least once. This year both budgets were defeated twice and the town budget was defeated three times. What is the alternative?

Clinton needs adult, top-down budget supervision that determines what resources are available rather than asking what departments and agencies need and want.

An acceptable budget can only be achieved opposite to the way one reads a novel. You start at the end and work backward. Consolidation, regional resource sharing, and more aggressive money management are all measures that can’t and needn’t wait seven months until the next self-inflicted budget referendum crisis.

Kirk Carr

Clinton

Kirk Carr (R) serves as an alternate on the Board of Finance.