Background
My wife and I bought a house in a small-ish town and moved outta the big city around a year ago. Being new home owners we're having to pay attention to stuff that we used to get to ignore (in the standard American way), this particular issue is about local government and taxes....
Like most of the country, maybe a little more, MA has been having a bit of a fiscal crisis for the past few years. Now you can blame whomever you like for this, but that's not necessarily what this is about. In MA the public schools are funded from local property taxes as well as state funding. We have a law that says that property taxes can't increase by more than 2.5% each year unless the town votes to increase it more. These votes have become known as "2 1/2 Overrides" and have been been coming to vote more and more the past few years.
The Current Situation
The town we moved to has been seeing a big increase in the number of students in the school system, mainly because they keep approving large new developments filled with 4 bedroom houses. Since I live in one of these developments I can't say that they're ALL bad, but you have to look at them in the grand scheme. In my development the average number of kids is about 2.5, with a lot of the houses having 3-4, and most of these kids are middle school - early high school age. The town voted 3yrs ago to allocate money to build a new high school, to go with the new middle school which went up about 7yrs ago, which is now complete. Since that time the state level of funding has gone down, but these new high priced MacMansions have generated enough extra property taxes to keep the budget static. So more kids are entering the schools, but the budget isn't growing so they can't hire new teachers and such, so they have to shuffle stuff around and cancel classes and add study halls. The town government has come up with this big plan to shuffle everyone around once the new high school opens to make things better, but they don't have any money budgeted to open the place..so they want to override 2 1/2 to get the money to open the school. The PR quotes are "the school CAN NOT and WILL NOT open without the override" and "our current HS won't pass accredidation in 06 without the new HS" and if they don't then kids can't get into college and property values will plummet....
So it seems simple right? figure out how much money you need to open the school and ask to override for that much. But why stop there? as long as you're playing on fears of parents that their kids are being jipped out of an education and have the ralley cry "won't someone please think of the children" all setup, why not slide in some extra money for yourself? and hence there is now a $1.9M override on the ballot, a 9.5% increase...about $1.3M to open the school (why it takes $1.3M to open a finished building is beyond me) and then stuff like $250g for town employee health plans and more money for fixing up some sidewalks and such. If you dig a little deeper you find out that our town pays 90% of the health care costs for all town employees, 15% MORE than the next highest surrounding town and around 25% more than the average for surrounding towns. When you ask the town administrators about this they say it's mandated by state law and they can't change it...until one guy dug up the actual state law and pointed out in the paper that 10% is the minimum that the workers have to pay..it's not a fixed mandate. What the law actually says is that you're allowed to negotiate the % the employee pays to anywhere between 10% and 50%. We also don't charge for bussing kids to school (surrounding towns do) and have the lowest fees for school sports of all surrounding towns. But even still the town gov says that they're cut to the bone and have nowhere else to save money...riiiight
In an interview in the last local paper the town administrator talked about how they are going to switch to a more logical health plan setup over the current ad-hoc style they have and he expects that to save around $400g a year in fees, but he stressed that the town employee % would still remain the same. he said it like 5 times in a 800 word article. then at the end he said if the override didn't pass then they would "have to go back and look at what they can do with the co-pay percentages..."! this is the same guy that's been saying for the past 2 years that the % is set by state law. what he basically said is "we're never going to decide to increase the amount of money we pay for our own healthcare unless we're absolutely forced to...". and THAT is how the government works, why pay for it yourself when the taxpayers will pay for it for you?! So you take an issue that may or may not be really needed and tack on your own BS to it to get stuff you want that voters would never support. So the end result is that I have to vote NO on the override when there is a chance I would have voted yes, all because these arseholes not wanting to pay more for their healthcare.....nice.
My wife and I bought a house in a small-ish town and moved outta the big city around a year ago. Being new home owners we're having to pay attention to stuff that we used to get to ignore (in the standard American way), this particular issue is about local government and taxes....
Like most of the country, maybe a little more, MA has been having a bit of a fiscal crisis for the past few years. Now you can blame whomever you like for this, but that's not necessarily what this is about. In MA the public schools are funded from local property taxes as well as state funding. We have a law that says that property taxes can't increase by more than 2.5% each year unless the town votes to increase it more. These votes have become known as "2 1/2 Overrides" and have been been coming to vote more and more the past few years.
The Current Situation
The town we moved to has been seeing a big increase in the number of students in the school system, mainly because they keep approving large new developments filled with 4 bedroom houses. Since I live in one of these developments I can't say that they're ALL bad, but you have to look at them in the grand scheme. In my development the average number of kids is about 2.5, with a lot of the houses having 3-4, and most of these kids are middle school - early high school age. The town voted 3yrs ago to allocate money to build a new high school, to go with the new middle school which went up about 7yrs ago, which is now complete. Since that time the state level of funding has gone down, but these new high priced MacMansions have generated enough extra property taxes to keep the budget static. So more kids are entering the schools, but the budget isn't growing so they can't hire new teachers and such, so they have to shuffle stuff around and cancel classes and add study halls. The town government has come up with this big plan to shuffle everyone around once the new high school opens to make things better, but they don't have any money budgeted to open the place..so they want to override 2 1/2 to get the money to open the school. The PR quotes are "the school CAN NOT and WILL NOT open without the override" and "our current HS won't pass accredidation in 06 without the new HS" and if they don't then kids can't get into college and property values will plummet....
So it seems simple right? figure out how much money you need to open the school and ask to override for that much. But why stop there? as long as you're playing on fears of parents that their kids are being jipped out of an education and have the ralley cry "won't someone please think of the children" all setup, why not slide in some extra money for yourself? and hence there is now a $1.9M override on the ballot, a 9.5% increase...about $1.3M to open the school (why it takes $1.3M to open a finished building is beyond me) and then stuff like $250g for town employee health plans and more money for fixing up some sidewalks and such. If you dig a little deeper you find out that our town pays 90% of the health care costs for all town employees, 15% MORE than the next highest surrounding town and around 25% more than the average for surrounding towns. When you ask the town administrators about this they say it's mandated by state law and they can't change it...until one guy dug up the actual state law and pointed out in the paper that 10% is the minimum that the workers have to pay..it's not a fixed mandate. What the law actually says is that you're allowed to negotiate the % the employee pays to anywhere between 10% and 50%. We also don't charge for bussing kids to school (surrounding towns do) and have the lowest fees for school sports of all surrounding towns. But even still the town gov says that they're cut to the bone and have nowhere else to save money...riiiight
In an interview in the last local paper the town administrator talked about how they are going to switch to a more logical health plan setup over the current ad-hoc style they have and he expects that to save around $400g a year in fees, but he stressed that the town employee % would still remain the same. he said it like 5 times in a 800 word article. then at the end he said if the override didn't pass then they would "have to go back and look at what they can do with the co-pay percentages..."! this is the same guy that's been saying for the past 2 years that the % is set by state law. what he basically said is "we're never going to decide to increase the amount of money we pay for our own healthcare unless we're absolutely forced to...". and THAT is how the government works, why pay for it yourself when the taxpayers will pay for it for you?! So you take an issue that may or may not be really needed and tack on your own BS to it to get stuff you want that voters would never support. So the end result is that I have to vote NO on the override when there is a chance I would have voted yes, all because these arseholes not wanting to pay more for their healthcare.....nice.