Confused? Ask The Voters

When Newtown’s charter was revised a year ago, a provision was added to the town’s rules for governing itself that enables the Legislative Council to place local questions on the annual budget ballot. Town referendums are great democratic devices for settling yes-or-no questions definitively, but their two-word vocabulary is often too limited to address the inevitable questions that eddy to the surface in the wake of a big vote. The charter revision allows the council to ask a follow-up question or two to help it formulate an informed response to a budget rejection at referendum. From what we have heard at the budget hearings of the Board of Finance and the Legislative Council and in the deliberations in between, the use of such advisory questions might come in handy this year.

In a normal year, if we assume there is such a thing, those who think the town is spending too much and those who think the town is spending just enough, or maybe not quite enough, line up neatly on either side of the yes-no equation. When it comes to fiscal matters, however, this is no normal year and all the standard equations are being turned inside out. After town department heads and school officials made a good faith effort to keep their budget requests this year to a bare minimum, the Board of Finance recommended additional cuts, including another million-dollar slice out of the school budget, which left education advocates aghast. While they prevailed on the Legislative Council to restore a small portion of that money ($133,000 to the school budget), the council insisted on keeping spending to a level that would raise taxes less than one mill — 0.999 mill to be exact. The end result has split school advocates. The Board of Education and the school district’s administration is urging voters to avoid the prospect of further budget cuts by passing the proposed budget on April 28. Others, including council member Po Murray, believe the finance board crossed a line with its million-dollar bite out of the school budget, and they now argue the budget, especially school expenditures, are too low, warranting a budget rejection.

This development puts a group of people favoring more spending in league with those favoring less spending in their efforts to defeat the budget on April 28. If they fail in that effort, the result is clear cut: Newtown’s budgetmakers give each other high fives and the council sets the tax rate at 23.43 mills. If they succeed, the two groups will claim two contradictory mandates. And this is the point where an advisory question would prove useful to the council: “Shall the council further reduce the expenditures in this budget if it is defeated?”

Both school board Chairman Elaine McClure and Superintendent of Schools Janet Robinson argued against an advisory question last week, suggesting that it would be impossible to determine why No voters rejected the budget since some of the answers to the advisory question would inevitably come from Yes voters, an argument that apparently help sway the council to reject the idea this week.

That argument makes sense only if you’re interested in hearing from people on one side of the issue. The question should be posed to the entire electorate, not just those who happened to prevail in an initial vote. If a majority of all the electors who voted in the referendum favor, or reject, further cuts, a second budget predicated on that demonstrated majority preference should fare a lot better than one that ignores the majority. We do not understand how having the council operate in the dark is somehow preferable to having the guidance of the voters themselves. And what was the point of amending the charter to allow advisory questions if we are going to be too timid or confused to use them?