At Town Meeting, the voters of Middlebury were given the
chance to have more control of the way their tax dollars are spent. An advisory
vote was taken to assist the Selectboard in deciding whether to continue to
fund health and social service agencies from the town's general budget, or to
separate the budget and the funding to subject them to separate votes by the
residents.
Selectman Fred Copeland suggested that we take advantage of
the opportunity to review for ourselves the way we spend those tax dollars. He
posed several questions for discussion. I will answer them here.
Would it be a threat to the funding of these organizations?
From the experience of neighboring towns which approve their agency funding by
other means, the answer is no.
Do the voters want more of a say about their tax burden and
the town expenditures? In all likelihood, the funding from the town would be
the same. Therefore, the expenditures and taxes would be the same. It would be
a different method of getting to the same place.
Would it be too much trouble or too much work for town
residents to analyze the budgets of these agencies and decide on our own how
they should be funded? Yes. We elect our public officials specifically for the
purpose of evaluating large amounts of information and making sensible
decisions based on that information and their own experience. The Selectboard
are experienced at evaluating budgets of social services agencies; I am not.
The Selectboard has paid assistants to help them understand material they
receive, and they speak with the voice of the whole town when they ask for
information from, or make recommendations to, these agencies. As an individual,
even were I to give a large amount of my income to one or more of these agencies.
I could not speak with the voice of a powerful legal entity with a large
budget.
The Selectboard, as attested by members of the board and by
officers of various area health and social services agencies, scrutinizes the
annual budgets of each of the agencies which request municipal funding. The
Selectboard concerns itself largely with the services provided by that agency
to residents of the Town of Middlebury .
The Selectboard can suggest, as they did this year, that all agencies only
request level funding, rather than increases, due to additional expenses borne
by the Town this year. Every agency respected that request.
We have the opportunity to take upon ourselves a greater
portion of the burden of self-government. We must commend the Selectboard for
offering us that opportunity. We must also know when these issues must be
decided as individuals, and when we can delegate that authority to our elected
representatives. This time it is the latter. We must encourage the Selectboard
to continue to offer us the opportunity to govern ourselves more directly; we
must also support them in their efforts to perform the tasks we delegate to
them.
In this instance, voters' time would be largely wasted by debating
each of the agencies' funding requests
each year at Town Meeting. Most of us would be arguing from positions of
anecdotal information, largely unsupported by facts. We would not have read,
even once, the annual reports of these organizations whose line-item budgets
are examined carefully by our Selectboard. Funding to these organizations would
not be threatened substantially, and the democratic process would be subverted
by discussion which would change little.
The Selectboard are the proper body to consider funding
requests from health and social service agencies. The body politic must support
them in their effort. We must also offer our input at every opportunity, so
that they may know our opinions when they include the funding for these
agencies in the general town budget.
We also must recognize that municipal funding is a small
portion of the budgets of these organizations, and we, as members of the
public, must support them with our own charitable contributions as well. Kudos
to the agencies for their hard work, and to the Selectboard for so ably
representing and remaining mindful of the public interest.