I have remarked before that the Town of Groton, where I reside, has a governmental system quite a bit more complex than that outlined in the Constitution of the United States. We have a Town Manager, a Town Council, a Representative Town Meeting, and a Board of Education, not to mention seven fire districts, the City of Groton and Groton Long Point. That’s 10 taxing authorities in one town. The Charter that created this system appears to have been constructed so that the system would be institutionally biased toward conservative, unimaginative government. This is nowhere more evident than in the budget process, which anyone who has been involved in government knows, is the part of the process that drives everything else.
I’m doing this from memory, so I may have some of the details wrong, but the process works roughly like this:
The Town Manager proposes a budget. He is legally obligated to make no changes to the Board of Education’s budget request, and, for purely political reasons, he can make no changes to the budget requests made by other political subdivisions, such as Groton Long Point. (Oddly enough, while the Board of Education’s budget often arrives as an orphan, bereft of support from the Town Manager and/or many members of the Council, the subdivision’s budgets arrive as privileged children, almost always exempt from meaningful oversight. Perhaps the relative sizes of the requests involved explain the disparate treatment. But I digress)
The Town Council can add to the Town Manager’s budget, but rarely does. It can also cut the Town Manager’s budget, which it has frequently done. Last year, the Council essentially ordered the Town Manager to produce a budget within predetermined constraints. This violated the spirit of even our stingy charter, since it appears that it is intended that the Manager give the Council a budget that he or she feels is necessary to deliver the services that the town is supposed to provide.
After the Council passes the budget, the Representative Town Meeting must pass it as well. The RTM, under the Charter, actually has the final word on the budget, because the changes it makes do not go back to anyone. However, the charter has a bias toward further fiscal constraint so far as the RTM is concerned. A mere majority of the RTM can cut any line item-it takes a super majority to increase any line item, and that increase can never exceed the amount that was originally in the Town Manager’s budget. Again, you can see that when the Council mandates that the Town Manager keep his budget within predetermined constraints, it trespasses on the RTM’s prerogatives, because they cannot restore that which was never there. It’s a largely academic point, however, because it’s so hard for the RTM to increase funding for anything, since the minority, not the majority, controls whenever an increase is proposed.
Basically, the path of least resistance throughout the process is toward cuts in funding, and it has historically been the case that Groton has had a low tax rate and an unimaginative government with a fairly mediocre school system, especially considering the population base being served. Not for us to try to create an interesting environment for our citizens. Not for us to even pick up the garbage-most of us must pay for that ourselves.
One thing the charter lacks is a provision allowing for yet another whack at reducing services, (particularly education)-the budget referendum. This post is already getting to be too long, so I won’t go in to my philosophical reasons for opposing the referendum process, but on a practical level it’s fair to say that it is a potent tool for those who, no longer having, or never having had, children in school, want to cripple the educational system.
There is a certain rhythm to Groton politics. Every few years a group of “taxpayers” (the rest of us apparently don’t pay taxes) push for a charter review commission in order to add the referendum to our already skewed process. So far, not a single commission has recommended the adoption of a referendum. I was on a commission some time ago, and I helped derail it then. It was a fairly unpleasant experience, ending with my being called some fairly profane names by some of my fellow commissioners, many of whom resigned mid-stream, but we ended up doing no harm, which is the most one can expect from these commissions.
Another one is being formed, and tomorrow I will be interviewing for a seat on the commission. I really can’t think of anything I’d less like to do (well, that’s not really true, I would prefer it to being tortured), but when I saw a list of the people who have applied to be on the commission, I reluctantly threw my hat in the ring. These folks have an agenda, and it’s not good government.
ERRATA: One to whose expertise I must defer informs me in a comment that the last Charter Revision Commission did in fact propose a referendum, which was voted down because referendum supporters felt it would be too hard to invoke. You can’t please some people.
