As regular readers, particularly my fellow Grotonites, know, the Groton Long Point police issue is a bit of a hobbyhorse for me. A few months back I was feeling great (and vindicated) because the Representative Town Meeting voted to end the Town’s long time subsidy of this unnecessary service to the most affluent of our local citizenry. Given the deep cuts inflicted on the really important items in the budget, getting rid of this boondoggle seemed like an obvious thing to do.
But some things are universal, apparently, and one of those things is the ability of almost any legislative body to feel the pain of the rich:
The Town Council will try to restore money cut from the Groton Long Point Association’s police budget, voting at its next meeting to spend $128,000 from its $350,000 contingency account.
The appropriation would then go to the town’s Representative Town Meeting, which last spring voted to strip the subdivision of the $208,000 it had initially requested, the equivalent of what it would cost the town to police the area with its own force.
“We do pay our fair share of taxes, and we receive very few services,” said Groton Long Point Association President Bob Congdon, speaking at the Town Council’s Committee of the Whole meeting Tuesday night. “This was one of the very few services we did receive.”
The empathy was bi-partisan. In fact, the only vote against was from a Republican, which speaks volumes about the fact that this part of Connecticut may be one of the few places in the country in which rational Republicans still reside. But, I digress.
The last time I looked, we allow the children of Groton Long Point in our schools. We plow and maintain their roads. We let them in our library. In fact, when a real crime is committed there, as opposed to the crime of entering Groton Long Point when not a resident, we provide police services. There is probably not a single service the town provides that they don’t get, except, possibly, whatever scant services are provided to the poor. Of course, we are not providing any of those services to anyone as well as we used to, because we have been cutting the budget, urged on by “taxpayers” organization consisting mainly of residents of Groton Long Point. So, as in the nation, so is it in our little town. The rich demand and get their perks, while insisting that the rest of us make sacrifices.
But, hope remains. Maybe the RTM will stick to its guns. Stay tuned.
Postscript: I should add that the contingency fund, as I always understood it, is supposed to be for unforeseen expenses, not to reinstate a line item intentionally removed from the budget. There are probably a thousand things that money would be better spent on, such as teachers, but the rich must be served.
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