A Proposal For Better Budgeting

To the Editor:

As a public official my words and actions are fair game for the local newspaper, as anyone who read beyond the headline and first few sentences of last week’s Bee article found out. For those of you who did not, you may be under the impression that I proposed to dump the Board of Finance on behalf of the entire Board of Education and I did not care how many of my constituents I ignored to do it! If you had read beyond the first sentence, you found out that I spoke as a taxpayer and citizen of Newtown, not a member of the Board of Education.

What you did not read is that after I left the Charter Revision Commission Meeting at approximately 9:30 pm, I attended the balance of my Board of Education meeting until after 11 pm.

However, the question remains, why did I spend the beginning of my evening at the Charter Revision Commission instead of the Board of Education meeting? Because as a taxpayer and someone who has been intimately involved in the political process, I believe that changing our town charter is vital to the future of Newtown. Newtown’s complicated structure of government, pieced together by the results of the last charter revision election, works to discourage the citizens of Newtown from participating in the decision process.

My proposal is to incorporate the Board of Finance in to the Legislative Council. For example, the Legislative Council currently contains 12 members. We can expand the Legislative Council to be 18 members, with six dedicated positions for the Board of Finance, which would be a subcommittee of the Legislative Council. Currently, the chairman of the Legislative Council determines who serves on each subcommittee; however under my proposal, the people would directly elect the members of the Board of Finance subcommittee. This would also preserve the ability for people with particular financial expertise to run for these positions and guarantee their participation on the Board of Finance subcommittee.

As The Bee article indicates, this would allow the Board of Finance to vote in concert with the remainder of the Legislative Council when the decision to pass on a project, or a budget, to the people is being made. The proposal in fact increases the power of the Board of Finance by giving its members a vote in the final decision, as opposed to their advisory role in the current charter. The key to my proposal is to promote balanced decisionmaking between the financial and political representatives of our town. My proposal further streamlines the process so that a citizen is encouraged to participate in a voting meeting knowing that they only have to come before one body, as opposed to the many stops a project or budget goes through now.

Newtown’s future depends on balanced decisionmaking. The valuable information provided by the Board of Finance is necessary to this process, but it should be balanced by the differing interests of the people represented in the Legislative Council. My proposal is designed to ensure that the public, either directly or through a cross section of its representatives, has the opportunity to make the choice on those issues that effect Newtown most. It gives us smaller, streamlined government, balanced decisionmaking, and a process that encourages our citizens to participate in the decisions that are critical to the future of Newtown.

My proposal is designed to streamline the government process and allow the most public participation in the decisions that are critical to Newtown’s future.

Andrew Buzzi

122 Hanover Road, Newtown                            September 13, 2006