By CHRIS POWELL
For the second straight year hundreds of people in Bloomfield are sore that while their side prevailed overwhelmingly in a referendum on the town budget, which they opposed, they still lost and the budget again has been deemed approved, this time with a 3% tax increase. Some property owners will end up facing a tax increase approaching 11% because the town is still implementing updated property valuations, which have soared with inflation.
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According to the Hartford Courant, the vote was 1,959 against the budget to 305 for it, a margin of 6½ to 1. But the protest failed because Bloomfield has an ordinance requiring budget referendums to gain the participation of 15% of the town’s voters. To meet that requirement another 2,287 people would have had to vote.
Bloomfield’s ordinance isn’t unique. Other towns have similar provisions. They are based on the old presumption that silence implies consent, which is especially undemocratic in the context of elections and referendums, since many townspeople who didn’t vote could have opposed the budget’s tax increase if they had bothered to think about it. Maybe they’ll think about it when their next tax bills arrive, but it will be too late.
The ordinance’s presumption is also that elected officials who go through the trouble of developing a budget deserve some deference and shouldn’t be stymied by a small minority of voters. After all, those officials won their own elections with more votes than were cast against the budget.
Presuming that silence signifies consent, Bloomfield Mayor Anthony Harrington told the Courant that people who didn’t vote realized that the budget was a lean as it could be.
The mayor asked: “Where would the budget reductions come from? Would the Board of Education, town services for seniors, human services, leisure services, our new Prosser Library, the Department of Public Works, or Town Hall be impacted negatively by these changes?”
Indeed, perpetrating what are called the Washington Monument and Punish the Public syndromes, the town manager’s budget initially had proposed saving money by eliminating municipal trash collection and closing the town swimming pool.
But while the mayor’s question may have been rhetorical, it deserves a serious answer, especially since the question is often posed elsewhere and never gets one.
Yes, Bloomfield’s budget could have been reduced in all the aspects cited by the mayor, as well as many others, without devastating services to the public. For the biggest single expense in government in Connecticut is personnel, and with laws requiring unionization of state and municipal government employees, binding arbitration of their union contracts, and insulation for government employees against discipline for misconduct or negligence, state government has essentially put the costs of government personnel beyond economizing.
All together these laws result in compensation for government employees that is far more generous than what is received by private-sector employees in comparable jobs.
That is what state and municipal elected and budget officials are hinting at when they shrug and say their budgeting options are limited by “fixed costs.”
You can eliminate trash collection, but you can’t readily freeze or reduce government employee salaries.
You can close the town pool but you can’t require government employees to give up their paid day off purportedly honoring Columbus.
You can suspend an employee for a day or two for being intoxicated on the job but you can’t fire him.
So practically every year brings property tax increases on the municipal level and, on the state level, direct tax increases or tax increases hidden in consumer prices or financed by de-facto borrowing from the state pension funds, which increases state government’s liabilities.
The solution is obvious but always unspoken: To freeze or reduce taxes, you have to unfix the “fixed costs.”
Those costs weren’t fixed by God but by legislators and governors who long have been subservient to a particular special interest — a special interest that has come to control an entire political party, a special interest that the other major party is usually too timid to challenge.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 