After just six months of debate, the bureaucratic equivalent of the blink of an eye, the town is now poised to change the way it votes on budgets. Last week, the Legislative Council voted to accept recommendations of the Charter Revision Commission to add two shades of discernment to Newtown’s traditional Yes/No referendum votes on local spending plans. Instead of just thumbs up or thumbs down, voters may now offer open palms of explanation by voting: Yes, approve the budget; No, reject the budget because it is too high; or No, reject the budget because it is too low.

In approving this modest change in the process of decision, the council and Charter Revision Commission sidestepped a more controversial proposal to split Newtown’s budget into two components — town and school expenditures — to be voted on separately. The idea broadened the vocabulary of the local funding dialogue to include “bifurcation,” the favored noun for the separate vote plan. It also offered an attractive solution particularly for school spending advocates, who saw it as a means to protect vital yet expensive school programs from budget cutters emboldened by vague budget rejections and in search of low-hanging fruit. In the end, some of those advocates, one of them a member of the charter revision panel, abandoned the idea after learning that other towns that had split budget votes were seeing more frequent school budget rejections.

The overwhelming, if not unanimous, consensus of the Charter Revision Commission, and now the Legislative Council, is that this limited charter change will be a good first step toward bringing better guidance to the Legislative Council when it must respond to a defeated budget. Whether or not the town takes that step in time for this year’s budget vote depends on the willingness of 15 percent of the local electorate (about 2,400 voters) to come out to support the charter change in a March 29 vote — hardly a sure thing for a nonbudget referendum.

While the proposed charter change is a way of preparing for the worst outcome of the budget process, this year there is reason to hope for the best, which is to say a budget approval on the first vote. Both town and school officials have been making extra efforts this year to engage the public throughout the budget process, communicating both the details of their respective budgets and the rationale for their priorities with the considerable array of media available to them. Most of this public information is available online in various places on the town and school district websites, or all together in one place in the “Follow The Money” section of NewtownBee.com.

One result of this concerted effort for engagement and openness is that the budget process seems to be progressing with less spin, stridency, and contention than in years past. This focus on getting it right the first time comes against a darkening fiscal horizon on the state and federal levels. Governor Dannel P. Malloy this week presented a budget that, while preserving educational cost sharing grants for the towns, raised state taxes in ways that should heighten taxpayer resistance locally. Meanwhile, the new Republican-controlled House of Representatives in Washington took up a bill this week that would shrink domestic spending by $100 billion and deprive Connecticut municipalities of more than $180 million in Community Development Block Grants and funding programs for everything from affordable housing and police to replacement of aging bridges. If ever there was a year when everyone has to pull together to make our Newtown’s resources go farther than ever, this is it.

We just hope the seriousness of purpose that has marked the budget process so far carries through the deliberations of the Board of Finance and Legislative Council this month and next, and the voters endorse that effort with a first-round budget approval. If that happens, the new budget tool we seek through charter revision next month may be the only thing we acquire for ourselves as a town this year that we really didn’t need.