A Demand To Be Heard

Next week, Newtown’s Board of Finance will consider whether to accept an invitation from the Connecticut Municipal Consortium for Fiscal Responsibility to join a statewide effort to make state government more accountable and responsive to the interests of Connecticut’s towns and cities. In addition to finance board members, consortium representatives hope to sign up local elected officials on the Legislative Council, Board of Selectmen, and Board of Education in coming weeks.

If this invitation is accepted, Newtown will join more than 80 other towns that hope to get the attention, and eventually the cooperation, of state and federal lawmakers on issues critical to their financial future: funding for mandated programs and a review of the state’s binding arbitration and prevailing wage laws. While the emphasis in this initiative is on these legislative issues, the impetus is a growing concern on the part of local leaders across the state that they are fast losing control of municipal budgets and tax rates to forces beyond their reach in Hartford and Washington, D.C. They watch legislators paying rapt attention to well-funded lobbyists for union and corporate interests and then watch laws favorable to those interests flow the legislative chambers. The municipal consortium hopes to change that dynamic.

The state and federal governments are good at handing out obligations that last forever — for special education, for tax exemptions, for contracting capital projects, and for contract negotiations themselves. But when it comes to handing out money to help fund those obligations, its facility falters in the next state budget crunch, which never seems to be more than a year or two away.

We urge Newtown’s elected officials to join with other consortium members around the state to plead the case of local property taxpayer. Connecticut’s municipalities need to secure equal footing in Hartford with the union and corporate lobbies. Legislators need to be reminded on a regular basis that every voter in Connecticut lives in a town or city where property taxes are rising five and six percent a year or more, while classrooms grow more crowded, services are cut, and plans for essential capital projects are deferred or abandoned altogether largely because of “fixed costs” passed down from Washington to Hartford to Main Street.

It is time to send something in the other direction, even if it is only a demand to be heard.