Everybody Is Unhappy

What we are beginning to understand about life in a time of economic straits is that not only do our resources drain away, so does our patience and trust. This week’s rejection of a $104 million budget proposal by the voters of Newtown helped quantify the extent of the political disquiet in town with a pair of numbers — 1,899 and 1,848 — the vote tally. Divining what those numbers mean is now the task of the Legislative Council, and given the fact that nearly everybody is unhappy about the state of our municipal finances for different reasons, that task looks impossible.

The sole question on the ballot — Shall the sum of $104,687,615 be appropriated as the annual town budget for the 2010-2011 fiscal year? — demanded a yes-or-no answer, which foreclosed any understanding of why people were voting the way they did. In an attempt to get a better grasp on why people were voting Yes or No, The Bee conducted an online survey between April 23 and 27, which 183 people completed. We posed 11 follow-up questions to find out why people were voting Yes on the budget question, and why people were voting No, going through all the permutations of preference with regard to town and school expenditures.

The survey, while far from reliable as a snapshot of the electorate because of the demographics of the online community and the small size of the sample, showed widespread unhappiness with the budget prepared by the Boards of Selectmen and Education and subsequently altered and ratified by the Board of Finance and the Legislative Council. Even a majority of those who indicated in the survey that they intended to vote for the budget said they were only doing so to prevent the Legislative Council from making things worse through additional cuts. Ultimately, only 13 percent of the survey respondents thought the proposed budget was the right budget for Newtown this year.

The survey results, and especially the comments respondents left behind, suggest that everyone on the boards and council involved in preparing this year’s budget has their own coterie of critics, alleging hidden agendas, biases, and stubborn intransigence. (The survey results and the 81 comments left by respondents can be found online at NewtownBee.com.)

Discerning trends in all the unhappiness is difficult. Generally, the people who indicated they were voting against the budget proposal were more interested in additional cuts in spending rather than additional expenditures, but the small size of this differential in the survey relative to the number of people who actually voted in the referendum makes such a general observation more speculative than conclusive.

Clearly, Newtown’s budgetmakers could use an advisory question or two of their own on the ballot in the next referendum vote. Whatever legal barriers, if any, there are to this device for understanding the electorate should be poked, prodded, and, if necessary, legislated or litigated until they fall away. Apparently, most voters believe their elected leaders are operating in the dark when it comes to this year’s budget. Any little light to help show the way would be welcome.

The larger challenge may be winning back the trust of the electorate. Notwithstanding the unprecedented openness of this year’s budget process, with exhaustive documentation and detailed explanations available on demand at both the town’s and The Bee’s websites, comments by our survey’s respondents indicate that taxpayers still feel a disconnect from the people who are spending their tax dollars. The poor turnout for Tuesday’s vote, at 21 percent, may be the best evidence of that disconnect. Perhaps it is not that the budget process itself is not transparent enough, but that Newtown’s electorate remains too opaque for its elected representatives.

Yes, every board conducts the requisite number of budget hearings, usually listening to people speak to them en masse in interest groups. In this kind of forum, the messages often become homogenized and malleable in service of the desired political effect for the moment, but for whatever reason, individual voices are rarely heard in any great number. Tuning into those voices, whether through the innovative use of technology or through more traditional methods of outreach like neighborhood coffees or informal public discussion groups in settings designed to attract demographically diverse groups, would help the budget process immensely. Not everyone will go away happy, but most people feel more vested in a process once their voices are heard. And having heard those voices, elected officials will be better equipped to make decisions in the public interest.