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Note 1: Tell Us What You Want
By: The Hopkinton Appropriations Committee
Residents of the town of
Hopkinton
over the past few years could be forgiven for
believing that their town officials have a wolf
fixation. Each
of the past several winters has brought forth
predictions of impending fiscal doom, the result
of an inexorably growing imbalance between town
revenues and expenses.
Yet, by the time of each May election, a
casual observer might believe that the wolf at the
door has disappeared, leaving behind only those
who were crying of its approach.
Somehow the gap is closed and, by all
appearances, the town continues to function just
fine. To
anyone familiar with the workings of government in
particular, or bureaucracy in general, this could
well appear to be the typical evolution of an
inherently messy but appropriately functioning
budget process.
Maybe so, but we on the Appropriations
Committee are concerned and we would like to hear
from you. The
purpose of this set of articles is not to sound an
alarm bell, warn of a falling sky or signal an
impending train wreck.
Instead, this is the first in a series of
short notes that the Appropriations Committee
plans to publish over the next few months to
present our views on the town’s situation and
future choices.
We are not undertaking this effort to
advance any particular agenda.
It is a simple fact that the town’s
budget is growing rapidly, we have used up almost
all of our Stabilization Fund and the vast
majority of future revenue increases will have to
come from our property taxes.
But this only becomes a crisis when we no
longer want to pay for what we get.
You will find no opinion here on what you
should or shouldn’t want.
As an appointed committee, our task is to
balance the operational budget based upon
priorities dictated by the townspeople and their
elected representatives.
We don’t set policy; we just make sure
the numbers add up.
However, our job is becoming increasingly
difficult and we feel obligated to ask exactly
what those priorities are.
The remainder of the notes in this series
will each focus on a particular topic related to
the town’s finances.
In the four notes to come, we will discuss
in order: the operational budget; the revenue
sources; and the resulting gap between the two.
We will then close with our expectations of
the impacts, from a purely financial standpoint,
of several of the choices that our town will have
to make in the next few years.
For the critical point is that we will have
to make some choices.
Boom periods like the one we experienced
until 2002 make for one easy choice: fund
everything. But
reversion to the mean is a nasty process, and the
end of the boom means that future revenue growth
simply will not support the kind of expense
increases that it did until recently.
We have, until now, been largely successful
at avoiding the pain of either dramatic tax
increases or substantial service cuts.
This has come primarily through heavy use
of our “savings account,” the Stabilization
Fund, from which we have drawn $3 million over the
past three years.
With that fund now nearly gone, the
situation can no longer continue as is.
That may sound perilously close to alarmist;
however, it also presents us with a unique
opportunity. For
all its growth and change over the recent past,
Hopkinton is still a town whose final mold has not
been set. High
tax, lower tax; more growth, less growth; more
open and residential, more dense and commercial;
more focused on schools or not; in these and
numerous other ways we as residents still can
decide what we want our town to become.
Whether you plan to stay here for three
years or three generations, how involved you get,
what you vote for and who you elect all have an
outsize impact because of the many different paths
we can still take.
You will find few other places where you as
an individual can shape the future as you can
here.
We will leave it to the advocacy groups for
each choice to convert you to their cause.
In addition to the operational expenses
they advocate, these groups often also have
additional needs that hit the budget indirectly,
in the form of capital spending articles for
buildings, fields and the like.
Each of them, of course, still raises your
taxes and increases the total debt of the town.
Since fields must be maintained and
buildings staffed, each expense also drives
further increases in the operational budget.
Even without these articles, the
operational budget will continue to increase due
to other reasons; however, we mention this issue
of capital expenses just to point out the impacts
before setting it aside.
Partly for simplicity and partly for
brevity, these articles will focus exclusively
upon the operational budget, leaving the other
items for another time.
What we, as a committee, hope is to
encourage more of you to participate in this
process as we make these decisions and to help
grow the town in the best way for all of us.
You will be hearing more in the next few
months about a number of initiatives to get your
input and to offer you the opportunity to get
involved. These
articles are a part of that process; an effort to
level the field of knowledge, to help all of us to
understand where we are so we can make better
choices about where we want to go.
Next:
Expenses
This
is the first installment in a series of articles
on the town’s finances prepared by the Hopkinton
Appropriations Committee.
To receive future notes in this series,
please send an e-mail to: appropriations@hopkinton.org
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