Town meeting was yesterday, which naturally, meant that it snowed. We only got 3-4", but it was very heavy stuff.
We had some big stuff on the proposed budget this year; a loader, a backhoe, several expendable trust funds to be added to, and a huge jump in the road maintenance budget.
The meeting was fairly well attended, although there were some notable exceptions that I won't get into, besides it seemed that they were sulking because they didn't get SB2 to pass (a change where everthing would be voted on at the general election - no town meeting). Both parking lots were filled, as was the church parking on the other side of the street.
The long and the short of it, was Deering's town meeting attendees spent money like drunken sailors. The road budget, which was already inflated by 170k, had an extra 25k added to it. A warrent article for 200k, to work on a specific road project was upped by an extra 25k (and that doesn't include the extra money that will be collected with vehicle registration that will go to the road crew - voted on during Tuesday's elections). the raising of the monies may not have passed if some of the people that are normally there had not been absent.
Nobody even blinked over spending almost 200k on a loader and backhoe, although I suggested we might want to put them on seperate articles and vote on them seperately (nope, we wanted to vote on an all or nothing proposition).
All of the original budget and money items passed, along with additions. The original budget was 9% over last year's, and the orignal money items (warrant articles) was 15% over last year's - before money was added.
However, townspeople spent 30 minutes arguing over a warrant article that had no money attached! They also spent at least 20 minutes trying to take money away from the conservation commission (which only gets its proceeds from tax penalties for taking land out of current use). The excuse was that this would help offset some of the incerease in taxes that would be felt fromthe increased budget.
People, at best it would have brought in 12k - not nearly enough to wipe out even one of the items that they upped. We finally had to leave before the vote on that was taken because WS needed to go plow at work. We had been there since 9 AM, and we left at 2:30. If there had been anything big remaining, I would have returned, but I decided that I didn't care about the 7k left to vote on.
I can hardly wait for the moaning to begin when our tax bills come out next November (we won't see the cahnge in the June taxes). On just our little place, that isn't really worth all that much, I figure the tax hike will be about $500 (depending on how the school budget increase plays in).
Should be fun at next year's meeting anyway, after the reckoning has come due!
We have our own set of drunken sailors in Sedgwick County. Kansas is supposed to be a conservative state; but, I've begun to believe that conservatives are the tax and spend folks, these days. (We'll comiserate over a cup of hot chocolate?)
Posted by: Cop Car | March 16, 2008 at 10:58 AM