Budget Growth Is Out Of Line

To the Editor:

I am seriously concerned by the rate of growth of the Newtown education budget and its short-term and long-term consequences. We know budgets only go up, never down, and therefore every increase is effectively permanent.

Here are the increases for the last seven years, during slow economic times with hardly any inflation: 8.7 percent, 13.3 percent, 7.5 percent, 8.3 percent, 7.6 percent, 7.5 percent, and the currently requested 7.95 percent, for an average increase of 8.7 percent. When compounded, this means the education budget will be 72 percent larger than it was just seven years ago. We are setting ourselves up for serious long-term problems if we don’t change this trend.

We are also creating short-term problems for the rest of the town services and our taxpayers. Increases in the education budget that exceed the overall economic rate of growth translate into decreases in other budgets. This includes the budgets of taxpayers, few of whose incomes are growing anything like the rate of the education budget. And it includes the budget for other town services. During the above period, excluding this year’s proposed budget, the town’s budget for other services increased a much more realistic and appropriate 14.5 percent, or 2.4 percent per year. As we all know, the library was one of the services that saw no increase at all last year.

I think it is fair to ask the superintendent and the school board to start bringing in budgets with 3 percent to 4 percent increases, far more in line with the overall increases that we are seeing in the rest of the economy. Every increase above that for the education budget comes at the expense of something else. Please join me by communicating directly to the powers that be and at the voting booth that the time has arrived for budget increases to be in line with growth in other sectors.

Jim Greenwood

10 Elm Drive, Newtown                                           February 12, 2005