A Million By Any Other Name…

To the Editor:

When is a million dollars not a million dollars? Apparently when it helps to explain a bad decision. In an article in last week’s Bee, First Selectman Herb Rosenthal states that it is not fair to call the ball fields on the Amaral property million-dollar ball fields. According to our selectmen if the funds come from three different accounts you don’t have to add them together to come up with a final number.

By keeping the accounts separate, we can say that we bought open space, we will have two new ball fields and we kept our public works department busy. If on the other hand we combine the three accounts we would have to admit that we bought the wrong open space to put ball fields on and have a balance of $200,000 worth of postponed public works projects.

I don’t think anyone questions the need for open space or ball fields, but someone should be held accountable for how our money is spent.

Soon we are going to sell the properties on Queen Street. Hopefully we won’t use any creative accounting when we look to recover the cost in purchasing this property. Besides the original purchase price, we have been paying interest on this property for about three years and had maintenance costs. When we sell it, we will incur advertising costs, staff costs, commissions, auction fees, etc. To ignore these costs is fiscally irresponsible.

As we take on larger projects we cannot tolerate any creative accounting; there will be enough slip-ups with projects of this size as it is. Just look at the 5/6 school. It is my understanding that we are now running overhead power lines to the school because the original bid did not include an item for providing power. In order not to go back to the well so early in the game and appropriate additional funds to bury the power lines we chose to go the less expensive overhead route. By saving a few thousand dollars here we will spoil the views from Wasserman Drive that our 22 million dollar investment in buying the Fairfield Hills Campus was supposed to preserve.

It is time for our officials to plan their purchases and expenditures, not just react to every vocal citizens’ group that presses their demands. Our mill rate is 31 and climbing with no commercial development in sight. Wasting our tax dollars by building ball fields on the side of a hill and in the middle of a wetland can only be attributed to the lack of planning. It is not unfair to call a million dollar ball field a million dollar ball field when you have spent a million dollars for it.

Sincerely,

Dawn Swendsen

Mt Nebo Road, Newtown              September 5, 2001