Even though I don’t live in Brattleboro, I attended a recent, special meeting about the town’s budget, which was developed by the Select Board, passed by the Representative Town Meeting, and defeated by a referendum. The initial budget was the work of months of meetings – but none so well attended as last week’s, where so many people showed up they had to find a bigger room. At issue was the five percent across-the board cuts the Select Board suggested in response to the budget’s defeat. These cuts would affect every town department.
They would reduce both the library’s staff and hours of operation, eliminate the Animal Control Officer, end sidewalk snow plowing, gut the Recreation and Parks summer programming, reduce manpower at the fire department, reduce office hours for the Town Clerk, and postpone, again, upgrades to the fire and police stations, upgrades that have been pushed aside regularly for the last nineteen years, if not longer.
During the two-and-a-half hours I was able to stay, I heard about thirty of the more than 160 people in attendance speak with eloquence and passion. Some spoke in favor of the police-fire project, some for the library. Several seniors spoke in favor of a reduced budget. One confessed that she already keeps her thermostat set at sixty in the winter, so that she can pay her taxes. A few people suggested ways to increase revenue, from a one per cent local option tax that has been defeated twice in recent years, to pay-as-you-throw fees instead of tax-supported municipal trash pick up.
As I listened to the impassioned pleas from each constituency to reduce the budget but still save a particular service, a few things became clear to me: The first is that like many towns in Vermont, Brattleboro has habitually deferred expenditures on maintenance in an effort to keep the current tax-rate low. The second is that everyone wants all the services the town currently provides – and maybe even a few more – but they don’t want to pay for them. Third and perhaps most significantly, is that the single group that stands to be most affected by both reduced services and perpetual deferment of maintenance and capital improvements, has no voice in this debate.
I speak, of course, of the children. It’s the kids of Brattleboro who stand to lose most. The cuts to the recreation and library programs will make for a long summer. But I’m afraid that the unintended consequences may be much greater than mere lack of supervision and summer enrichment.
What these future voters may learn is that the people with power look out for themselves first - and that even at the local level, politics is about special interests, not about the communal good.
They may also inherit their elders’ antipathy to taxes – so that they, too, will learn to delay paying for what needs to be done now for some currently un-enfranchised, future generation.
