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Split The Budget Vote

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Split The Budget Vote

The Legislative Council has resolved that the summer of 2012 should be neither lazy nor hazy, choosing instead to work expeditiously to bring some clarity to a budget process that this year has confounded the usually sharp minds of Newtown’s budgetmakers. The council has decided to go ahead with a fast-track charter revision initiative that will next year allow voters to get specific about what they don’t like about any given budget proposal while they are still in the voting booth. The current system, with its dizzying eddies of spin and counterspin in the wake of budget rejections, is proving not to be a direct route to consensus, but rather a dangerous spiral into complete confusion. It is a process the council does not want to repeat next year.

The goal is to get the required charter changes on the general election ballot this November, which will require the charter revision process to be completed by September 7. Much of the work toward meeting that goal was done by the last charter revision commission, which thoroughly researched the issues surrounding ballot questions and budget voting options in preparing the charter revisions that failed last year. (They failed not because they were rejected, but because too few voters showed up at the polls to meet minimum state requirements for changing the town’s governing document.)

A new charter revision commission should be able to pick up where the old commission left off, beginning with its conclusion that local budget ballots need to allow those voting to reject a spending package to indicate whether they thought the proposal was too low or too high. It should also reconsider another proposal to split the town and school spending proposals into separate votes. That idea has been consistently resisted in Newtown for fear of politicizing the budget and pitting one part of our mutual municipal enterprise against another. To be honest, that is already happening. The arguments surrounding school spending levels lie at the heart of this year’s budget stalemate.

For those still conflicted about a divided budget vote — abstrusely dubbed “bifurcation” by some — consider this year’s budget process in New Milford and Simsbury; both towns cast separate ballots for town and school spending. The two towns passed both sides of their respective budgets on the first try last month, raising taxes in New Milford by 2.5 percent and in Simsbury by 1.65 percent. On June 5, Newtown voters rejected a third-try tax increase proposal of 1.07 percent amid amped-up acrimony over the relative merits of higher levels of school spending and lower levels of taxation. And it remains unclear where the argument will end. Perhaps we have it backwards. Perhaps our current system fosters a more politicized budget process.

If anything argues for a clean break with our current system of voting on budgets, this year’s brouhaha is it. Following Newtown’s third swing-and-a-miss at a budget plan early this month, First Selectman Pat Llodra declared “the process is broken.” Now is not the time to tweak that failed process. It is time to try something completely new.

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