Town Budget

I've been thinking about the budget and some of the priorities reflected therein. But let's get to first principles.

What is a town for?

To provide services to the citizens. If there were no services, there would be no need for the town.

How are the services provided? The town's employees deliver the services. The water plant doesn't operate itself. Neither does it repair itself. The water meters don't read themselves and the bills don't get in the mail by themselves. The streets and sidewalks aren't self repairing.

No employees - no services. It's as simple as that.

Last year the town board decided to balance the budget on the backs of our employees by establishing and gradually increasing a monetary contribution by each employee to purchase his or her health insurance. The scheme was to reduce the town's contribution to health insurance, but to compensate somewhat by increasing wages and salaries. Even if this modification to the pay structure resulted in a dollar for dollar compensation (one dollar increase in pay for each dollar of decrease in the town's contribution to health insurance), the burden on the employee would be greater. We would replace an untaxed benefit (health) with a taxed benefit (wages).

We're talking about employees making as little as $11.00 an hour, who are having difficulty buying enough gas to get to work and we want to place another burden on them? These are people for the most part who can't afford to live in Oriental and walk or bicycle to work. And they don't buy Priuses.

So where might the town get the money to continue paying employee health insurance as before and still balance the budget? A good place to start would have been to not spend the $22,000 the board spent to hire a lawyer to investigate the previous town manager in hopes of finding a cause to fire him that would save spending the $25,000 termination pay in the contract the town negotiated and signed.

A second place to look for how to balance the budget without passing the hat to the employees is to tap into the money the water system should have been paying to the general fund (recently recalculated) but hasn't. That's on the order of another $25,000 for the coming fiscal year.

I think there are better options than taking up a collection from the workers.