Tiverton Citizens for Change

And so begins the annual game of trying to determine how much of a tax increase Tiverton residents will have to stomach in the next budget:

To pay for what the town and schools say they need for next year would require an 11.83 percent property tax increase, said Jeff Caron, chairman of Tiverton’s elected budget committee.

If both the school department and the town “level funded” their budgets for next year — meaning they would spend no more dollars next year than they did this — their respective budgets would be close to next year’s cap of 4.5 percent.

Mr. Caron said the calculations in his Feb. 18 worksheet (which he says are subject to change) assume zero assistance from the state next year — no general state revenue sharing and no revenue to the town from state collected motor vehicle taxes. The amount needed from local property taxes next year to make up for that lost state revenues, he said, would be about 4.4 percent, just under the cap.

As we’ve seen, the School Committee does not seem as if it intends to ask for level funding, and on the municipal side, Town Council members and other local officials tend to talk about “zero impact,” which has, in the past, meant that the tax rate wouldn’t change although spending was increasing.

Whether the state will cut Rhode Island’s cities and towns to zero aid has yet to be seen, but prudence would suggest behaving as if it might. That’s a long-term prescription, by the way, requiring some rethinking about what our town does to promote economic growth.