Newtown’s system of budgeting and finance is in essence an apparatus designed for the distillation and blending of the community’s competing desires. Its effectiveness in any given year seems to depend on how hot the political fires are burning: too much political heat, the thing boils over and creates a mess that is difficult to clean up; too little political heat and the result is cold, dilute, and distasteful to almost everyone. Getting it right is tricky — a balancing act between the passion of purpose and the dispassion of simple arithmetic.

The process created by Newtown’s charter to successfully perform this alchemy has some critical parts of both the passionate sort and the dispassionate sort. The town’s financial desires percolate up from department heads and school administrators through the Boards of Selectmen and Education, which in turn sort and prioritize the requests. The choices are difficult; every program and project is dear to some committed constituency. Through the administrative agency of the selectmen and school board, the interests of the competing departments are weighed, apportioned, and forwarded to the bipartisan Board of Finance. In parsing the town’s wish list of projects and programs, the finance board concerns itself more with what is fiscally possible than with what is worthy. It does the math and calculates financial feasibility within its own established parameters for maintaining limited debt and accountability to taxpayers. The next step is a review by the Legislative Council, which holds the penultimate power to accept or reject the town’s spending plans before voters get the final say.

Currently, the Board of Finance occupies the critical nexus between imperatives of the government service providers represented by the Boards of Selectmen and Education, and the imperatives of the government service consumers — the taxpayers — represented by the Legislative Council. It is our local equivalent of the Congressional Office of Management and Budget, which provides apolitical assessment and advice to the other components of government that are both passionate and politicized. However, a proposal to revise the town’s system of capital improvement planning by the two current Independent Party of Newtown members of the Legislative Council, Gary Davis and Po Murray, would empower the council to project its interests and influence across the Board-of-Finance divide to the initial budget presentations by the selectmen and school board. They argue that the council should have a seat in the capital planning process from the very beginning so that the capital improvement plans (CIPs) and bonding resolutions that are eventually submitted to the council already reflect the council’s preferences, making the process more efficient.

The problem with allowing the council to hand out trump cards to favored capital projects prior to and during the Board of Finance review of the CIP is that many projects desperately sought by departments with small but important constituencies (think open space, or a concert venue, or road improvement projects) might never see the light of day. It is far easier, politically, to muscle less favored projects off the CIP list before the Board of Finance finds — as it has in the current CIP — that such projects are entirely possible and affordable even though they may be lesser priorities. Foreclosing possibility in the name of bureaucratic efficiency may benefit the Legislative Council, but it does not benefit the town.

This change to the CIP process will be considered by the newly elected Legislative Council after it convenes next month. We urge the council, which already has the final word on financial matters that are submitted to referenda and town meetings, not to interfere in the established process that leads to its fiscal deliberations. The finance board’s dispassionate and apolitical review of the capital improvement plan is a useful tool for everyone involved in local fiscal planning. It should not be pre-empted or blunted by the council.