Newtown voters are getting to the point where are they are receiving the Legislative Council’s serial budget proposals with the same enthusiasm they might greet yet another request for money from a ne’er-do-well relative. We want to say yes because we feel responsible and want to believe something good will come of it, but we are beginning to suspect that the best we might hope for is mere accommodation of a deteriorating set of circumstances.

This week we entered a new fiscal year with no approved budget in place. The bills will get paid with the help of the town’s fund balance and — if it comes to it — continuing tax assessments and eventually supplemental tax bills. The process has now drifted into the precincts of urgency and complication. Evidence of this is the rare Thursday referendum slated for July 12; a concession to the necessity of processing and delivery tax bills by August 1, should the fifth-round $106.2 million budget secure voter approval. And that is the best case scenario.

This latest budget proposal again employs a Solomonic strategy of trying to please both factions of erstwhile naysayers: again reducing spending and the tax rate for the zero-increase advocates, and recalculating school expenses to offer a “same services” option to education advocates. Unfortunately, these concessions may be received as insults by both voting blocs. The spending and tax reduction are more symbolic than significant and do not equal that magic number, zero. The “same services” option comes at the expense of full-day kindergarten — a deal breaker for many school supporters.

We favored the $107 million budget first proposed in April and urged approval of the three failed budget plans since then. With each passing vote, our level of enthusiasm for the budget has flagged. Yet we remain in support and again urge approval, not because the budget is everything we want, but because it is slowly becoming a budget that a majority of Newtowners will accept. It is not something they highlight in civics class, but sometimes democracy is a form of shared disappointment.

This disappointment, for us, however, would be mitigated if the town could muster a truer majority at the polls. Roughly one in four eligible voters have gone to the polls in each of the four referendums on the budget this year. The town’s budgetmakers have spent the past two months trying to accommodate the divided 13 percent of the electorate who have stood in opposition to the spending plans. Judging by their rhetoric, many of that number are especially resistant to accommodation. Unfortunately, those who make a specialty of opposition and inflexibility are duly rewarded by those who stay home. It would be interesting, this time, to see what other rewards might come if a majority of Newtown voters actually went to the polls.