1. Revenue of $41,694,093.
2. Expenditures of $40,771,673.
3. With a surplus of $922,420.

That number includes the school system, but does not include so-called “restricted funds” that arrive as grants and the like (which, thanks to the current federal administration, amounted to quite a bit of money).

In other words, as I understand the process, having just pushed through a large tax increase in the midst of a continuing recession, the town of Tiverton is set to apply almost a million dollars into its general fund.

Also mentioned during the course of the night’s meeting was that the fire department has found a supplier for a new $600,000 fire truck, and the DPW has just received a new pickup. Me, I can’t afford Christmas presents for my children.

So far, Rep. Jay Edwards has presented State House certificate to each of the departing members; the departing council members have given short speeches of thanks; and Town Clerk Nancy Mello has offered some parting gifts for them.

7:16 p.m.

All new town officials have been sworn in, and the new town council has taken seats and, with David Nelson’s nomnation and no alternate nominations,Jay Lambert has become the president of the council.

Ed Roderick nominated Cecil Leonard for vice president, and with no alternate nominations, the leadership of the council have been set.

7:19 p.m.

President Lambert asked if anybody had any of the new members have opening remarks. Ed Roderick is leading off, and he’s thanking the outgoing council members for making him “a better person.”

Cecil Leonard followed with similar remarks.

David Nelson thanked the voters and the outgoing members.

Rob Coulter announced that he’s resigned from the Budget Committee. He echoed the repeated need that all citizens be represented and promised to give a voice to those most in need.

Joan Chabot offered thanks and looks forward to working with everybody. She highlighted the mix of skills and demographics on the council.

Lambert almost missed Brett Pelletier, who is sitting at the far left of the table. He expressed the need to look toward the future of the town rather than the past or the immediate future.

The “community-minded” long-time residents aren’t selfless souls pleading with their fellow townsfolk to put Tiverton ahead of themselves when times require it. Some of them are protecting the substantial pay and benefits of their public-sector jobs (or those of friends and family). Some of them are protecting favored programs from which they individually benefit. And some of them simply want the town to be run according to their vision for it, with contrary views humored but not incorporated.

And so, as Tom Killin Dalglish reports:

By a vote of 4-2, the Town Council Monday night imposed new time and sound limits on the musical fund raiser “Singing Out Against Hunger” scheduled for early September at Evelyn’s Drive-In and Coastal Roasters.

The event must now end at 7 p.m., said the council, not 9 p.m. (or 9:30 p.m. as the sponsors were hoping for this year). And there may now be “no amplification.”

Councilors Jay Lambert and Cecil Leonard voted against the restrictions, and Hannibal Costa was absent, which leaves Louise Durfee, Joanne Arruda, Don Bollin, and Ed Roderick imposing the rules. Durfee made the motion and spearheaded the opposition, and it isn’t surprising at all that a Town Council that permits its appointed Town Administrator to send false documents to the state en route to a massive tax increase and that Town Council members who would then sue the president of the local tax-payer group, David Nelson of Tiverton Citizens for Change, for complaining about that action, would squash a good cause that fills the community’s late-summer air with music.

From the Sakonnet Times:

At the hearing, Councilor Louise Durfee said she had gotten complaints that the music went on after it was supposed to, and that other noise went on after the official ending time. The neighbors nearby, and across Nanaquacket Pond could hear the music and Ms. Durfee later said she could hear the music from her home on Highland Road. …

“You’re on a postage stamp piece of property. Your neighbor goes to work at 4 a.m.,” she said.

From the Newport Daily News:

Council members hear complaints about the noise every year, Councilwoman Louise Durfee said. She made the motion at the council’s meeting last week to prohibit amplification and to cut back the hours. Money should not be raised “at somebody else’s expense, and that is what is happening,” she said.

No businesses. No charity. No public events. And high taxes. Sometimes sleepy little towns aren’t bucolic; they’re dying.

It’s wonderful that national tea party activities have been putting pressure on elected officials at the federal level. It’s also important that, in Rhode Island, the Ocean State Policy Research Institute has formed as a think tank following issues of statewide concern, that the Rhode Island Statewide Coalition is taking an increasingly active role in highlighting bad legislation and reviewing candidates for office, and that the Rhode Island Tea Party has directed its activities toward statewide issues as well as national. I’ve maintained, however, that individual activism should begin at the city and town level, where government office is most accessible and where basic political principles have an immediate and local effect on voters’ lives.

We’re certainly finding, in my hometown of Tiverton, RI, that members of the political establishment who operate locally are willing to act as the vanguard in intimidating active residents (of the undesirable sort) to get out of politics.

The same week Tiverton Citizens for Change President David Nelson officially put his name down as a potential candidate for Town Council, two current members of that body, Louise Durfee and Joanne Arruda, filed a defamation lawsuit against him (and an unnamed group of John and Jane Does that may turn out to include me). Their lawyer, Jeffrey Schreck, sent the initial threat of litigation to Mr. Nelson shortly before this year’s contentious financial town meeting, and I’ll have more to say about the suspicious timing of these events, as well as the lack of merits to their claim, in the future, but on first review, I have to express my disappointment at the level of thinking that the resources of our public judiciary must be expended to address.

The substance of the complaint made by Arruda and Durfee — the latter a former director of the state Department of Environmental Management and one-time candidate for governor — hardly has grammatical grounds, let alone legal ones — from a PDF of the summons:

6. The Letter accuses plaintiffs and their allies of submitting false documentation to the State of Rhode Island to support a tax increase. The Letter further states that this accusation of official misconduct by plaintiffs is “not an idle charge” and is “well-documented.” The Letter accuses plaintiffs and others who constitute a majority of the members of the Town Council of making “a practice of sending secret, falsified documents to the state government.”

7. Mr. Nelson’s statements in the Letter accuse plaintiffs of wrongful, criminal conduct, and assert that TCC has written evidence to support his charges.

Here’s the relevant section of the offending letter from Mr. Nelson:

Still worse are the efforts of Ms Durfee, Joanne Arruda and their allies, in deliberate cooperation with the Town Administrator to avoid a Town Council vote exceeding the State Tax cap. They have submitted false documentation to the State to facilitate a tax increase of at least 9%. This is not an idle charge, and it is well documented. Town Administrator Goncalo has stressed that the documents are secret except for him, the Town Treasurer, Budget Committee, and the State. In fact, he promised “to find out who put that form on the Internet”, as if posting public documents is now a matter for witch hunts and suppression of transparency. We have this on tape.

It is astounding that a town official would make a practice of sending secret, falsified documents to the state government based on information that distorts the current status of the town’s budget process. More astonishing is that a majority of the Town Council supports it.

Either Durfee and Arruda have skin so thin that it pains them even to be in proximity of accusations, or they’re twisting the facts in order to present themselves as victims. Their names appear in the letter specifically with reference to efforts to “avoid a Town Council vote exceeding the State Tax cap,” which is irrefutably accurate, given the months of public debate in which they took precisely that position. The “they” who submitted false documents to the state is the whole group of “allies,” including Mr. Goncalo, and it is simply a fact that he did so. Whether Durfee and Arruda’s cooperation with the larger effort extended to direct prior knowledge of Goncalo’s act is immaterial, although it’s reasonable to have suspicions.

Furthermore, as evident in video of the Town Council meeting at which TCC brought this matter to a public head, the town administrator clearly did stress that his act was meant to be secret. And Nelson’s letter explicitly faults “a town official” — that is, Town Administrator James Goncalo — for this particular action within the larger campaign to avoid the letter of the tax cap law.

Lastly, as is also evident in the video, the lack of outrage from the majority of the Town Council implicitly lends their support. If, as their lawsuit implies, Durfee and Arruda believe that Mr. Goncalo’s actions were “criminal conduct” — an accusation that Nelson’s letter does not make — then they are guilty of shirking their responsibility by not censuring their employee when the matter came to their attention.

That local elected officials — who deserve partial blame for the town’s thinning tax base and demand for massive tax increases in the midst of an historic recession — would twist language for political purposes is to be expected. That they would seek to leverage the overburdened court system in an effort to cost a candidate for local office time and money during campaign season is one more example of the methodology by which political insiders have fostered public disengagement from the political process.

But the council and the School Committee, it was noted, are prohibited from using public funds to influence a vote, per a charter amendment that was crafted by Caron and approved several years ago. How then, council members wondered, would they get the word out to voters about a budget they recommended?

[Town Councilor Louise] Durfee suggested doing away with that charter amendment, which is number 1218.

Section 1218 of the Town Charter (PDF) reads as follows:

No officer or employee of the Town, including the school Department, shall use, or cause to be used, Town property, goods, money, grants, or labor to influence the outcome of an election, ballot question, Financial Town Meeting, or referendum; the foregoing shall not prohibit the distribution or publication of election, ballot question, Financial Town Meeting, or referendum information by the Town Clerk, the Board of Canvassers, or a Charter Review Commission.

There is simply nothing in that language that would make a public hearing prior to an all-day financial referendum or special election different from the open forum of the financial town meeting. Town Council and School Committee members could still use their meetings (all televised on cable and available online) for political theater and manipulation. They could still speak in public and private forums. They could still use their own time and resources to advertise and promote their views in person, in print, on the Internet, on the radio, and on television. Just like anybody who does not share their privileged positions would have to do.

The real impetus behind the otherwise inexplicable introduction of 1218 to the discussion of changing the town’s budgetary process is that certain folks in Tiverton government do not like the restriction that the people of Tiverton voted into the charter just a couple of years ago, and they’ll seize any opportunity to eliminate it. Taxpayers provide various resources — including personnel — to elected and appointed officials in order to conduct the business of running the town, and some of them (Ms. Durfee leading the pack) would like to use those resources to influence outcomes.

Their reasoning isn’t entirely implausible. After all, they see absorbing an ever greater percentage of Tiverton residents’ wealth to be part of the business of running the town. From their perspective, they come up with budgets that they believe to be crucial to the town, and those who disagree are acting in contravention of Tiverton’s best interests.

The point lost in that thinking — and it’s a point that the people of Tiverton desperately need to relearn — is that budgetary control is an invaluable tool by which residents have input into municipal and school operation. It’s a check and balance beyond our regular elections — typically putting into office people with whom few voters are actually very familiar. A budget debate that gives those outside of government a fighting chance against those within is crucial because it requires groups that stand to gain financially from town expenditures to go that extra step beyond promoting preferred candidates and promote the actual dollar amounts that they’d like to extract from residents.

What the revaluation means for city finances, the tax rate and residential tax bills remains unclear. A potential 30-percent drop in the city’s $21.7 billion in total assessed property value (as of 2008) could mean a significant loss of revenue. …

Cicilline has pledged not to raise the property-tax levy — the total amount the city raises in property taxes — over this year’s $274 million. But he has not ruled out an increase in the tax rate, which is already one of the highest in the state, at $24.21 per $1,000 of assessed value for residential properties and $28.60 for commercial properties.

Owners of property in Tiverton needn’t worry about such ambiguity. It’s thoroughly accepted, in our local government, that the tax rate is little more than a midway calculation between the levy and the homeowner’s bill. The financial town meeting (FTM) sets the levy, and the town divides it up across all real estate owned, and your percentage of that real estate determines your percentage of the levy. No matter how worthless your house may become — as long as it doesn’t differ from the overall trends for the town — you’ll still receive the same tax bill.

The trees on Souza Road do provide oxygen, but the site provides very few tax dollars to benefit taxpayers. There is nothing appealing to the eye from Souza Road to Route 24. …

The rezoning of Souza Road from a commercial to residential zone was a weapon Tiverton used to prevent a multimillion-dollar development from being realized because the simple denial stamp was having difficulty stopping it. Was there some kind of vendetta unleashed on the developers’ plan for the site?

Minior goes on to address the local industrial park and the power plant thereon in a similar way. Do we dare hope that the likes of he will begin to take the reins of town government?

Not wanting to go through another financial town meeting this year — two in May was plenty — the Town Council will not change the way it plans to levy taxes in fiscal 2011 to compensate for a change in the motor vehicle excise tax exemption.

Property tax bills are expected to be printed this week and mailed early next week to more than 6,000 property owners. Their tax rate actually will be 5 cents less than was announced after the second session of the financial town meeting that ended on May 15.

The new tax rate for fiscal 2011 will be $15.35 per $1,000 valuation, instead of the $15.40 that initially was calculated, Town Administrator James Goncalo told the council Monday night. The rate for fiscal 2010 was $14.35.

Taxing ourselves so heavily at a contentious FTM seems to have averted an attempt to increase motor vehicle taxes. That’s for this year, of course. Now the Town Council et al. have two taxes to ratchet upwards.

I raise this bit of political trivia in tandem with an important correction to something that Deborah Pallasch wrote in a letter published in the Sakonnet Times, last week: Tiverton voters at the financial town meeting, she states, supported the School Committee’s requested budget because “they… understood that the state withholding $1.4 million dollars from us would mean hard choices and sacrifices by all.” Residents — especially parents of public school students — should know that at no point did the school department predict a loss of state funds anywhere near that amount.

Budgetary practices are unnecessarily complicated, in public education, but I’ll give you a few key numbers. In their initial budget request, the School Committee planned for a loss in general state aid of $172,217. Adding in “restricted” state funds — which the committee leaves out of its public budget presentation — the expected loss was still only $200,331. Even if we throw in the federal stimulus money that the state used to supplement its aid — which the committee inexplicably predicted to be $0 for the upcoming year — the predicted loss is still just $493,398, about one-third of Pallasch’s number.

A full accounting of its aid expectations that the School Committee provided to members of the Budget Committee shortly before the FTM shows an expected loss in aid of $836,384, but only if we include ostensibly one-time federal stimulus that counted as “restricted” funds. And that’s where Pallasch’s rhetorical slip becomes important.

The school department, led by Superintendent Bill Rearick, minimized its aid predictions and then asserted that it was $1.2+ million short on the budget that it claimed to need. The goal was to spend its federal windfall and build it into the regular budget, making the federal government’s short-term gift into a permanent local expense. To counter suggestions that the department should end “restricted” programs funded with disappearing dollars or pull back on free-running salary and benefit promises, the school administration and committee strove to keep the focus on an unrealistic threat to close a brand new (and bonded) elementary school and cancel every cherished program that the system offers.

Deborah Pallasch and her School Committee ally Carol Herrmann were key players in this strategy, and it continued even after the state Department of Education told Tiverton to budget for only a $211,467 decrease in state and general federal aid (3.8%). Well, the strategy worked. Thanks to the massive mid-recession increase in property taxes that the FTM imposed, the school department’s revenue is set to decrease by just $32,703, in the upcoming year, and that assumes not another penny in aid from above, restricted or otherwise.

Now, they expect their fellow Tivertonians to believe that they’re surprised that the teachers’ union would want its share of the pie that their scheme produced. Union members already had incentive to wait out the recession and then seek the retroactive raises that the School Committee has offered in the past. Why would a huge tax-increasing victory inspire a change in that strategy?

Political games from the national level down to the local ensured that the recession under which so many of us are suffering would hardly touch the public sector. At least we can now sit back and enjoy the show as an asserted need for union concessions turns into no concessions at all, or even a better deal for teachers.

Town Councilman Cecil Leonard, Budget Committee Chairman Jeff Caron and former councilman Brian Medeiros have made independent requests to the council to consider some town charter amendments relating to the financial town meeting.

A workshop has been scheduled for Monday at 7 p.m. at Town Hall, 343 Highland Road. “Tiverton clearly has outgrown the FTM,” Medeiros wrote in a letter proposing to “keep the good aspects of our current system, while replacing the many difficult, unworkable aspects of the current FTM.”

A couple of years ago, a similar effort arose from the observation that nobody was interested in the FTM, and the town had trouble securing a quorum to pass the budget. Now it’s a topic of interest because too many fully committed activist types are making a battlefield of the meeting. To me, that looks like the process of Tiverton relearning how to sustain a democratic governing system in which opposing parties actually exist.

Problems exist, to be sure. I most definitely empathize with parents who fear to vote publicly in contravention of their children’s teachers. A week ago, in order to retrieve one of my children at the end of the school day, I had to sign a form handed to me by a woman in an NEA Tiverton t-shirt. One doesn’t have to inflate such experiences into a sinister plot in order to think the symbolism significant and likely to have an effect on parents. It’s also easier to motivate people to attend an all-morning budget meeting when the votes that they’ll cast, there, will determine salaries or services that they receive far in excess of the cost to them. In other words, those who would increase the budget and provide the services have a natural advantage with the current system.

Still, I foresee problems with the proposed alternatives:

The voters of Tiverton should remain the governing body, or those who make the final decision on the budget, but instead of attending an hours-long meeting or two, voters could approve or reject a budget during an all-day referendum, Medeiros said. …

Caron is advocating that an annual financial town election replace the financial town meeting. “The concept is to replace the meeting with a secret ballot election; altering the Charter only as necessary so that electors vote the annual appropriations/levies in a secret ballot election rather than at a physical meeting,” he wrote.

In a reversed reflection of the difficulty that residents may have standing in opposition to their neighbors, people only mildly interested in the politics may find it all too easy to vote according to partisan interests and vague impressions when there’s nobody in the voting booth to stand up and make his or her case.

None of this should suggest that I’m advocating one plan over another, or over no change at all. I said I’m a believer in the FTM, but I’m not a believer in our town’s system of governance (or our state’s, for that matter). We’re locked in to a long, slow, self-perpetuating downward spiral, and it’s reasonable to expect that Jeff Caron’s plan for an “FTM election,” of sorts, would create an opening for those whose motivation is only the gradually expanding open wound of annual tax increases.

[Rhode Island Economic Development Commission Executive Director Keith] Stokes said Tiverton land values, cost structures, and businesses needed to be consistent and competitive with the adjoining states of Massachusetts and Connecticut.

The unstated connection — at least as reported — is that our town and state must be competitive for the benefit of home buyers (those who influence land values) and business operators (those who make the state economically competitive), and a check of the tax assessor’s page in neighboring Westport, Massachusetts, shows that Tiverton’s currently expected $15.40 tax rate compares with $5.25, there. That’s the 2007 number, the latest that a quick Google search revealed, but it’s unlikely that Westport’s rate has tripled in the past three years.

Yes, Massachusetts handles taxes according to different policies, with more aid coming from the state, as I understand, but few home buyers will develop a fully subtle understanding of such matters before comparing the amount that one town will add to the mortgage payment, compared with another town’s take.

Second:

[According to Stokes,] poor education leads to ignoring the local workforce in favor of importing better-educated workers from out-of-state. Fidelity investments, for example, in Smithfield imports a large percentage of its 3,000 employees from elsewhere.

One hears this line of reasoning frequently, and it always has a fatal flaw. An investment in an educated workforce is certainly necessary, but unless that workforce can find local employers, we’ll wind up exporting the fruits of our investment. That is what’s happening in Rhode Island, as our best and brightest find they must look to other states to provide the job opportunities that have motivated their hard work.

In short, if our investment in education — and let’s put aside Rhode Island’s and Tiverton’s questionable results — leads to policies that drive up the cost of living in the state and the difficulty of doing business, here, it can only be self-defeating. In the first stages of pulling Rhode Island out of the dry well into which it’s fallen, our attitude about businesses’ importing workers has to be, “so what,” followed by, “let’s do better from here forward. An active economy will provide the revenue to invest in education without making a disincentive of our town and state cost structures. Moreover, an influx of success-oriented (non-public-sector) residents, many of whom will bring families with them, can only improve voter input to better shape our school system.

Most importantly, an active business environment does not include a static workforce of initial employees. It grows. Diverges. Expands. As our children graduate from high school and college, they’ll find Rhode Island to be a first choice not just for familial, geographical, and social reasons, but for economic reasons, as well.

According to the Newport Daily news, however, the Town Council has thus far not made a decision:

That forces the town to decide if it will just continue to provide the $6,000 exemption to residents this year only, said Goncalo, or levy a motor vehicle excise tax above the $500. That action might require a spe­cial financial town meeting, Goncalo said.

The options currently on the table appear to fall into three categories:

• The town could ignore the new authority and keep taxation the same as it would have been if the General Assembly had not granted the power.
• The town could impose the tax and automatically adjust the property tax levy. Officially, the motor vehicle tax is a state tax that the towns are allowed to collect and keep, so an FTM might not be necessary.
• The town could host another FTM that could, presumably, determine that the municipality needs both the car tax and the property tax. (What limits the town could place on the third FTM before the fact, I don’t know.)

I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised, though. Rhode Island is a state in which the governor and General Assembly finally manage to work together only when they’re trying to subvert a decision by a regulatory body tasked with defending electricity consumers by passing a law that forces regulators to reconsider a specific (extremely expensive) project allocated to a preferred corporate entity. In that environment, why would a division of a department of a bureaucracy follow its own guidelines?

As far Tiverton is concerned, my stance is this. After the FTM, the projected tax rate was $15.40. Since we now can tax [motor vehicles] at full book value minus $500, the projected [real estate/tangible personal property] tax rate should be lower to offset the increase in MV taxes levied. Therefore, the property owner will pay less in RE tax, but they will be paying more on their car tax. It will be about a wash. But in no case will the taxes levied be higher than the levy voted on at the FTM. So, no net gain to the Town because of this change.

As Mr. Robert notes at the outset, this is his opinion. We learned well, during the just-concluded budget season, that all such matters are subject of fair and unfair debate and political maneuvering. The policy that the town actually pursues will depend on the opinions of a majority of Town Council members.

Essentially, I looked at the state and federal aid that the General Assembly’s budget allocated to Tiverton Schools, compared it with the number that our financial town meeting (FTM) assumed, and concluded that the school department would be receiving upwards of $600,000 more than expected. The state budget, at the time, called for $4,931,735 in state money and $394,326 in federal money filtered through the state, for a total of $5,326,061. The GA’s budget, as the enacted, allocates $4,923,363 state and $402,699 federal, for $5,326,062. The budget passed by the FTM assumed $4,641,742 in aid.

My mistake was that I took the state’s number to be exclusive of “restricted” funds. Federal aid does come in separate batches, but for the most part, the state uses the method of “restricting” percentages of the total aid that it provides. For the school year now concluding, Tiverton received $739,833 in “restricted” aid, which (if continued) would bring the total assumed by the FTM to $5,381,575, so the state actually allocated $55,514 less.

Two points emerge. First, it’s misleading to speak of state and federal aid without including “restricted” money; as the state budget shows, the dollars sum together with no difficulty, and the town simply moves money from one expenditure to another on paper. If I give you money but insist that you use it to pay your electric bill, the money with which you would otherwise made the payment is freed up for other purposes.

Second, not incorporating “restricted” aid in public budget calculations makes it very difficult for interested residents to follow along with the process and really understand the accounting over which the FTM gives us ultimate authority. The school department, when challenged on transparency, will protest that it provides anybody with any requested information, but the majority of electors will go by what they find in obvious places, like the FTM docket.