Last night, the Budget Committee voted to reduce the town administrator’s requested budget by $375,000, which is enough to keep the tax increase at 4.5% — the state-imposed cap.
People are free, of course, to make personal attacks and reduce everything to political rhetoric, but anybody who cares about Tiverton and — more importantly — the people who live here, should consider the actual numbers with which the Budget Committee is having to contend:
| Municipal requested budget | $17,597,083 |
| School requested budget | $22,036,715 |
| Total | $39,633,798 |
| Minus other town sources of revenue | ($3,011,919) |
| Minus state sources of revenue (governor’s budget) | ($294,752) |
| Minus motor vehicle property tax | ($1,050,000) |
| Total from property tax | $35,277,127 |
| Last year’s property tax total | $31,055,334 |
| % change | 13.59% |
If any of the Budget Committee’s numbers or assumptions are incorrect, I’m sure they’d love to hear it, but these are simply the financial facts, as accurately presented as is currently possible. Not long ago, members of all of the town’s boards, having played the negotiation game and thinking they’d done as well as they could with contracts and budgeting, just assumed that residents had to pick up whatever extra appeared when the calculator displayed its final number.
Not any more. Now there are Tiverton residents who notice when Town Solicitor Andy Teitz slips critical topics to the tail end of the Town Council’s agenda under “Solicitor Announcements, Comments and Questions.” This coming Monday, for example (PDF), the solicitor will be raising the topic of the town policy for exceeding the cap and offering a proposed resolution for the town to actually do so (presumably requesting state approval).
When people accuse TCC of unrealistic predictions and overly heated rhetoric, keep in mind the above numbers and the plain fact that exceeding the state cap already means an increase of more than 4.5%.
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[...] two letters on the Sakonnet Times Web site that merit note. The first, from me, is a version of this tivertoncc.com post describing the basic financial picture at which the Budget Committee has been looking. The numbers [...]