Democracy’s Many Moving Parts

It is an election year, and so once more we make an extra effort to understand our government, at least to an extent that will help us decide which way it ought to be moving. In dictatorships, autocracies, oligarchies, and theocracies, the system is easier to divine since citizens only need to understand one thing: Do what you are told. But our democracy confers on us liberties and freedoms that allow us to order our leaders around from the catbird seat of the voting booth, so it is useful to know what we are doing.

What we forget, sometimes, is that every year is an election year. In odd years, like this one, we elect our local government. In even years, we elect our state and federal representatives, with governors, senators, and presidents getting into the scrum every four or six years. Since local elections sit all by themselves on the odd end of the cycle, we are inclined to think of our community’s government as something discrete, operating under the principles of home rule in the closed world of its own interests. But the competing state budgets of Democratic legislative leaders and the Republican governor landed this past week in Hartford with an impact that will ripple and roll through most of the big decisions we will be asking our local leaders to make in the coming years. Far from being separate and distinct from the world at large, our community rides on the economic currents moving through the state, the nation, and beyond.

For example, the governor’s budget proposal includes significant cuts in state grants for special education, payments in lieu of local taxes, town aid for roads, and small town economic assistance. Both the governor and the legislative leadership are proposing cuts of more than $30 million in pass-through grants from the Pequot and Mohegan casinos and reduced assistance to local health districts. So when we listen to the local debate this summer and fall about property tax stability, about improved services and facilities, about bringing order and harmony to the local budget process, we need to remember there are larger forces at work that may already have shaped the disposition of these local priorities far beyond what any single candidate may say or do, no matter how hopeful or sincere he or she may be.

There are so many important moving parts in a functioning democracy that we need to keep our eye on all of them when we set out to calibrate any one component, like our local government, no matter how unique and set apart it may seem in our personal view of the world. In a system like ours and in times like these, cooperation works better than parochialism, coordination works better than isolation, communication works better than secrecy. Unfortunately, Newtown still harbors parochialism, isolation, and secrecy in some pockets of its elected leadership. This year, if we know what we are doing, we will clear out those pockets and get Newtown connected, synched up, and running as a very important part of the whole.