Just 269 of Tiverton's 12,314 registered voters cast ballots in this year's Financial Town Referendum that approved the Budget Committee's recommended budget & tax proposal (and also approved all six resolutions on the ballot). The outcome of the budget vote was never in doubt, as there was only one budget option on the ballot and no way to reject it (all six resolutions were also approved).
On the one hand, it's great that Tiverton came together around a consensus budget that maintained vital services at a reasonable cost. The Budget Committee, Town Council & School Committee deserve tremendous credit for their hard work and such a professional, thoughtful process after several years of having a political faction using every means to push its political agenda on the people of Tiverton. The importance of electing community-minded people to represent us couldn't be clearer.
On the other hand, because of the provisions of the FTR Charter Amendment voters approved in 2011, somewhere around $10,000 in taxpayer money was spent so 0.02% of voters could cast a vote in this FTR whose result was already decided. The obvious alternative was simply having the sole budget adopted without the time & expense of a meaningless FTR, and it's just one of the flaws in this FTR process that many of us pointed out before and after it was put before voters. We believed then (and still do) that an FTR process is superior to the Financial Town Mtg process many of us spent years trying to replace. But this year's waste of time & money is the result of what started as a non-partisan attempt to create a consensus FTR plan to replace the FTM being subverted by a political faction with its own agenda.
The Town Charter requires the election of a Charter Review Commission at least every six years, and the last was elected in 2007. Hopefully the upcoming CRC presents voters with a chance to improve the FTR process so that it both respects the will of voters and does so in a smart, cost-effective way.
Brian Medeiros
Tiverton, RI
No comments:
Post a Comment