What The Budget Vote Won’t Tell Us

If heat tempers budgets as it does steel, the Legislative Council’s $103.7 million spending proposal for 2009-2010 should slice right through whatever opposition remains to the controversial budget plan. Unfortunately, forging consensus in heated discussions on how and to what extent a community should apply dwindling resources in a severe recession is more psychology than physics. We may never know whether the Board of Finance and the council have correctly interpreted the thinking of Newtown voters even after all the votes are counted in the referendum vote on Tuesday, April 28.

Newtown’s budgetmakers are gambling that taxpayers will reward their ruthlessness in cutting costs in town and school expenses in a year of economic uncertainty with a first-round approval of a budget that, astonishingly, actually spends less — $1.7 million less — than the current year’s spending package. The rest of the world, however, seems to be moving backward economically at an even faster pace, so the retrenchment in state grants and the town’s grand list will push the tax rate up almost one percent, despite all the blood-letting. Whether or not the gamble will pay off next Tuesday depends in large part on a constituency of education advocates who believe the sacrifices asked of the schools in this budget are too dear to support.

We believe voters should and will approve the proposed budget next week, thanks to the good faith efforts of school and town officials to give greater weight to taxpayer relief than to their own perceived needs in an effort to avoid the kind of divisive and repeated budget rejections that have plagued Newtown in the past. However, the budgetmakers’ zeal in this regard may cloud the result and leave the town as divided as ever.

The council turned its back on including an advisory question (“Shall the council further reduce the expenditures in this budget if it is defeated?”) on the budget referendum ballot this year, citing specious arguments about semantics and the need for a certain “level of detail” in the questions. In so doing, the council introduced a measure of coercion into the vote. It put out the word that no matter what voters’ motivations are, if the budget is defeated, expenditures will be further reduced. The council is telling a possibly significant number of voters interested in maintaining unstinting support for Newtown’s school system — who believe the budget as proposed is unacceptably low — that if they vote in accordance with that belief they will be penalized by further cuts. Like the proverbial Yankee farmer at the side of the road, the council is telling this constituency, “You can’t get there from here.” We thought the democratic process was about possibility, not impossibility.

Let’s hope the budget sails through next week’s referendum with the support of a majority of voters who believe it is a fair package addressing the needs of the town, the school, and the taxpayers. It would be a shame, however, if the council ended up winning a budget fight because it maneuvered an electorate into voting for something it did not want. Either way, we may never know what people really wanted this year.