For clarification purposes from the article I am going to first address the following:
Town Councilor Jason Zandri, who supported Sullivan’s amendment, said increasing the tax rate to balance the budget instead of cutting education money would only mean an additional $5 a month for the average household.
“The lesser of the two evils here is to charge a little more in taxes,” said Zandri, a Democrat.
I want to have full context and explanation around this because as printed it is not fully clear.
The comments I made of "an additional $5.00 a month per average household" would be the TOTAL additional taxes charged IF we saved the additional Board of Education cuts AND included the increase in taxes that Mayor Dickinson already approved.
Mayor Dickinson approved $46.00 a year of additional taxes for median assessed homeowners and we were discussing an additional $14.00.
The "lesser of two evils" (further tax increase) comment came AFTER we had proposed other alternatives. I would rather pass on $14.00 of additional taxes than cut the Board of Education budget further.
We offered to raise the revenue side (income) calculations and proposed some other cuts to totally negate the tax increase and save the additional cuts to the Board of Education budget. This was voted down 6 to 3.
We offered to use an additional $280,000.00 from the rainy day fund to offset the additional cuts to the Board of Education budget. This current budget already included $4.3 million dollars from that fund allowing $6 million to remain behind - an additional $280,000.00 was easily handled. This was voted down 6 to 3.
We offered to up the taxes an additional $14.00 a year to avoid the additional cuts to the Board of Education budget. This was voted down 5 to 4.
If you favor this outcome then you've voted the correct people into office in 2011 and they have represented you well.
While I am disappointed with the cuts I am content with the process at how we arrived at this outcome; the people that did show up to vote, elected officials to perform this work on behalf of them and they carried out that duty.
If you think one of the other solutions provided was better or something else should have been suggested then you need to consider more like minded people when you go to vote in November.
As a follow up to that - only 37% of the registered voters showed up to vote in the last local election; the minority of about 6,000 voters is having their say for the majority of all Wallingford residents (approximately 45,000) many of whom cannot vote like the children in the school system.
More food for thought. At the end of the day, your local elections are at least as important as the Presidential ones (where Wallingford voters turn out at 85%). They impact your property taxes and the type of local services you receive, from Police and Fire to town operations. It also impacts the public school system where your children and grandchildren go to learn and become productive members of society.
It is important to vote always; to me there is more impact being one voice of 25,000 (the number of registered voters in Wallingford) over one voice of 150,000,000 (the approximate number of registered voters in the United States).
