When Newtown speaks in a referendum, it speaks only in numbers. The numbers it spoke last Tuesday in the vote rejecting a proposed $69 million budget were 1,632 and 1,413. The Legislative Council must now read those two numbers like tea leaves to determine why 1,632 people opposed its spending plan for 2000-2001 and why only 1,413 people favored it.

No matter what the interpretation – too much money for education, too much for ball fields, too much for town capital projects – the bottom line is the bottom line. In the past two weeks, when opposition to the proposed town budget came to a head, there was not much discussion of overspending in any particular area. The main complaint was that a 10 percent increase in property taxes is just too much to swallow in one gulp.

When it meets next Tuesday, the Legislative Council is expected to try to shave about a mill off the 2.9 mill tax increase that was rejected this week. To do that, it will have to come up with another $1.5 million in savings or extra outside revenue. We hope that the knife doesn’t cut too deeply into any one area of the budget – particularly the school budget, which went through a rigorous round of economizing even before it was submitted to the council for review. The cuts in spending should be spread as equitably as possible throughout the entire budget.

Some council members, even after they had submitted the original budget to the town for a vote, suggested that perhaps they could have prepared a better budget for the coming year. Now they will have the chance to do that.