Budgeting With An Eye On The Horizon

Newtown’s Board of Finance has invited taxpayers to a public hearing on Wednesday evening, February 28 (7:30 pm at Newtown High School), to review the town’s first $100 million-plus budget before the spending gets sent on to the Legislative Council for action. That’s a lot of money for a town of 27,000. But this town has some high expectations, especially for the education of its children, and as in most years, it is poised to spend nearly two-thirds of its budget preparing local kids for an uncertain future.

It is always tempting to view a town budget the way we might view a household budget: make sure immediate expenses are be covered by household income, plus set aside something for repairs around the place, and maybe put something away for retirement if there is anything left. Whatever you do, don’t spend money you don’t have or are unlikely to get on things you don’t need, which is the guiding principle behind most successful efforts to defeat town budgets at referendum.

The problem is that town’s don’t retire. There are no actuarial tables for a community’s lifespan. The future just goes on and on, and so do the expenses, which makes fiscal planning something of a guessing game. We understand the consequences of not repairing the roof, or not paying the utility bills, but what are the consequences of not maintaining a town? And who pays the ultimate price of neglect?

So the challenge is looking at our finances today in the context of the next 5, 10, 25 years, or even the next century. The hearing next week will consider the essentials and a few conveniences we might want for today, but just as important is an annual assessment of this community’s foundation — its lasting infrastructure. Is there something we need to do today that will help make the town sturdy and stable decades from now?

With precisely these questions in mind, the Board of Finance has suggested a new study that will help it predict what the town’s demographics will be when it all its residential land is built out. With that information, the board can fill in many of the blanks in its long-term financial planning, enabling it to better determine how many classrooms to build, how big a police force to finance, how many parks and recreational facilities, and what kind of social services will be required for that distant future population. It is not necessary to finance all the preparations for that future immediately, but it is important to ensure that all the smaller interim steps we take this year, and next, this decade, and the next, through a long succession of capital improvement plans will make as much sense to future generations in retrospect as they do to us right now.

We support the finance board’s efforts to better understand the future through demographic study. We also understand that there are so many other intangible factors beyond population that can quickly undermine whatever foundation we hope to build for the future of our community: an environmental or public health catastrophe, an economic collapse, crime or social unrest, or any of the various threats to society and culture that seem to come out of the blue. We can’t control everything about the future, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to get to know it a little better.