I am voting Yes for HES, and I am voting Yes to adopt the Charter. Not because ... long-range), and responsible for putt
Go Forward, Get More, Pay Less Anticipate, Plan, Manage I am voting Yes for HES, and I am voting Yes to adopt the Charter. Not because I think either is perfect, but because I am certain that going forward will be significantly better than discarding years of work and starting over. I only have to consider Town Hall for a recent example of getting less, taking longer, and probably spending more than if we had bitten the bullet and finished what we started. Looking further back, the problematic Public Safety Building and the one-story Center Fire Station are additional sad reminders. Like many opinions posted recently, the full text of what I wrote may be more detail than many readers will care to see, so here’s the synopsis: The tax impact, and the concern that HES will drive people out of Harvard because the tax load has become excessive, is the result of significant increases in operating costs in the last 30 years. It is not, for the most part, caused by debt load from building projects. If we adopt the Charter, and the Select Board steps up to drive planning and budgeting, we may be able to drive taxes down, or at least end inevitable increases. To try to understand how Harvard got here, I found a handy data table on the MA DOR website which lists, among other things, average tax bill for the last 30 years. Harvard’s average residential tax bill in 1988 (the year we broke ground for HES) was $2007. The 2018 average bill is $10,790. The average tax bill has more than quintupled (5x) in 30 years. Wow! To be sure, some of that increase was caused by debt service on building projects, but typically, those impacts are heavy for a few years and then they recede, and finally disappear. The five-fold increase in our tax bills is due mostly to increases in operating expenses. I have no doubt that we needed to spend more for public safety (fire, police, ambulance) and public works (road and building maintenance, snow plowing, etc.). And I am sure there are other line items in the omnibus budget that we badly needed. I am less certain that we are well served by piling on administrative expenses. By coincidence, I picked up the 1988 Town Report, and read that Selectmen hired the town’s first administrative executive, John Petrin, as Executive Secretary. Before that, we got by with elected officials - three Selectmen, a Treasurer/Tax Collector, a Town Clerk, three Assessors, etc. You could walk into Town Hall in the middle of the week and there might only be one or two people present. Through the years, the Executive Secretary morphed into Town Administrator (and later, an Assistant TM), many other positions have assistants and/or additional clerks. Ironically, back then many of the elected positions had an “honorarium”. We didn’t expect the elected volunteers to work for nothing, but they were small - $1500, $2500 e.g., but nothing approaching proper salaries. I checked that table of average tax bills again. Two years after the 1988 school project, when the first debt service came due, the average tax bill jumped to $2,475, an increase of 23.3% over the 1988 average bill. And it was about that time that Harvard first decided it needed an override to fully fund school operations. An $81,000 override was attempted, and failed. The next year, 1991, a $221,000 override for the General Operating Budget was attempted, and also failed. In 1992, four overrides
were attempted – schools $165k, Library $8k, Weed Harvester $4k, town employees salaries $48k. Schools and library passed, weed harvester and salaries failed. For the next 12 or 13 years, there were regular overrides, as small as $12k and as large as $280k. Some were capital and some were operating budget. Many were for schools, but significant increases were being requested for town operations also. Harvard was getting accustomed to increasing taxes to fund its growing appetite. By 2003 the average tax bill had grown to $5,164, 2.5 times what it was in 1988, right on track for quintupling in 30 years. We had another one year jump of more than 13% in 2004, probably first year debt service of a school project. Since then, yearly increases have been orderly but steady in the inexorable march to today’s level. For me, the major learning from this trip down memory lane is, it is seldom a single project, or a single administrative decision, that drives the cost of living in Harvard out of sight, but rather the cumulative effect of years of uncontrolled redundancy, expansion without review, and periodic needed investment. If core operations are allowed to grow unchecked, they are a damper when it comes time to expand or replace. Which leads me to my second point – the charter. I believe the unchecked growth in operating costs is a product of years of uncoordinated (or missing) planning and budgeting. I am excited by the prospect of having a charter that makes the “Select Board” responsible for planning (short-term and long-range), and responsible for putting the budget together for town meeting. For years, guidance for budgeting has been something like “level spending” or “level service” and then it has been up to the Finance Committee to weed out the excess. I hope we will see instructions from the Select Board like “the town needs to reduce spending by 20% in the near future, before preparing your budget please identify areas of spending that are no longer critical to your mission, and that could be reduced or eliminated. Don’t be constrained by the 20% overall target, if you can cut more, it may allow other departments to continue delivering more critical services.” In other words, Select Board, you own it, manage it! So I will vote for adopting the charter. If adopted, I won’t sit back and wait for selectmen to figure out what it means. I will lean on them, offer to help, do whatever it takes to get the ball rolling. I have been impressed by their decision to run this year’s budget as though they were already in charge. I have also been impressed by the behavior of some selectmen, pitching in to help the School Building Committee figure out financing, and throwing their support behind the project. That is very different than how selectmen behaved when Town Hall bids came in over budget, and their only guidance was, “go back to the town for more debt”. Because they didn’t recognize that a simple majority could have funded the overrun from free cash, the 60% that voted for the extra funding did so in vain, for lack of 2/3 debt exclusion vote. While none of us looks forward to higher taxes, voting YES now may save us money in the future, if the Select Board steps up to their new responsibilities.
