Newtown’s Charter Revision Commission learned a few things on its way to the public hearing it scheduled for Thursday evening this week. The panel is charged with proposing changes to the town charter that will help town and school budgetmakers avoid the kind of confusing stalemate on the budget that took five referendums to sort out this year. Specifically, the commission is considering a split budget vote — with voters casting ballots separately for town and school spending plans — and advisory ballot questions designed to help define specifically why voters might be dissatisfied with a given budget plan. But in researching the experiences of other towns across the state with split budgets and ballot questions, the commissioners found that the solution to Newtown’s budget problems may lie not only in its balloting process but also in its budgeting process.

In gathering information from Windham, Naugatuck, Lebanon, New Milford, Simsbury, Madison, and Watertown, the charter commissioners got mixed reviews on split, or bifurcated, budgets and a surprising number of complaints about ballot questions. Rather than having their intended clarifying effect, the questions were said to be confusing, though it was not quite specified how.

It should be noted that the commissioners spoke primarily with elected town officials in their statewide survey — elected officials with traditional preferences and prerogatives that could be upset by specific directives from the voting public. One Windham official noted that voters there became frustrated when elected leaders did not follow through in accordance with the public’s responses in advisory questions. And the first selectman in Madison suggested that advisory questions be crafted so they “don’t get in the way of elected officials’ ability to make decisions.” Both these responses suggest that the real problem may not have been the ballot questions but rather the resistance of elected officials to the answers to those questions.

Perhaps the most interesting theme that emerged from the charter panel’s research was that the key to success in several instances was not the data that came from counting and interpreting ballots after the vote, but the information that was compiled and conveyed to voters before the voting even began. For example, deep divisions in Windham over school spending were healed sufficiently for the budget to pass on the first try this year because a state-appointed special master for the school district brought “more discipline and transparency” to the education budget. Simsbury avoids budget conflicts through cooperative budget reviews by town and school officials, vetting and justifying expenses to each other and the public throughout the budget process. In Watertown, the town manager and school superintendent know each other’s budgets as well as they know their own. Through their collaboration the cooperation, the budget passed in Watertown this year on the first vote.

A split budget vote and clear, optional advisory questions, which we favor for Newtown, should help the town find its way around budget impasses more efficiently than it did this year. It may be the best remedy for failure. But Newtown really needs to focus more on a formula for success: more discipline, more transparency, and more cooperation from those working on both sides of the budget.