Flying wallets

The other night I was at our town Budget Committee's first meeting of 2006.  I'd been tapped to join the committee last Spring by its chairman, who must have been desperate in the wake of three longtime members' resignations.  Never good at number-crunching anyway, I'm finding municipal budgeting totally abstruse so far.  So I'm sitting there the other night pretending to peruse the latest spreadsheet while racking my brain for Roberts Rules phrases like "I second the motion," in hopes of making at least some small contribution to the proceedings.  I also wanted to move things along, because with Town Meeting coming up in March, and us having to formulate (and eventually defend) a small book's worth of budget-requests for the taxpayers to vote on, our now weekly meetings are running about three and a half hours each, which is tough to take on weeknights.

While staring at the spreadsheet, I felt eyes boring into me, and looked around to see brown eyeballs gazing out of the walls.  All around us hung new-agey paintings from the local arts group's Christmas sale.  These were the ones that didn't sell, and you could see why.  They were all variations on the same theme, by the same artist.  On narrow floor-to-ceiling panels were outlines of tree trunks with women's faces where you'd expect knots and limbs.  They had bulging eyes and long, witchey hair that merged into feathers of owls, suggesting, I guess, that we're all one, rooted in the earth.  This would have been okay, but the panels were all monochromatic - strokes of a boring brown on ivory; and they were repetitive.  Kind of like the budgeting process.

Around the main table under a harsh overhead light, sat eight or nine of us committee members, plus the three selectmen who govern our town.  A few feet from our table was a smaller table we'd set up for visiting Public, where the Road Commissioner now sat, and A., one of the committee members who had just resigned before I came on.  A., a self-employed woodworker, was there ostensibly to ride herd on the Road Commissioner, whose budget request each year is one of the town's biggest expenses.      

After about an hour and a half of wrangling about money to salt the roads, pay snowplowers overtime, ditching dirt roads, plugging potholes, etc. with A. objecting that the committee "spends money like water" and "rubberstamps anything that crosses your desk," we took up a new topic.  One of the selectmen reported that a neighboring town would give our residents membership to its beautiful new library for $4,000 per year.  Since that would be a little over $2 apiece for our 1500 residents, compared to the $45 annual fee now charged to individuals, this seemed like a sweet deal.  The selectman suggested that we recommend to appropriate it from property tax at the upcoming town meeting.  We took a vote, and passed it.

Just as the chairman announced this, A. at the Public table slung something at us.  It glanced off a selectman's head and landed in the middle of our table, A.'s billfold, splashing credit cards into our laps.  "Just take my wallet!" A. seethed.  "You might as well just take our money now."

The Chair called for order, said to calm down.  A. came over and picked up his credit cards, apologizing to the selectman he'd clocked.  "But no one even asked for library privileges!  This is a completely unnecessary expense."

At our meeting the following week, A. told us at the start of the meeting not to worry, that he'd left his wallet at home, as D., one of the town's most active volunteers, handed around an official-looking document with footnotes from the state administrative statutes and municipal association.  It was signed by D.'s husband, our town's official moderator for Town Meeting.  He warned that allowing unlimited public input to committee meetings, as we had last meeting, could be in violation of state statutes against "false public hearings."  The statute says that if we're voting on something, and the public is allowed to give input and thus possibly influence the vote, we could be seen as performing the function of a public hearing, and that we should bill it as such and give the entire town adequate notice and access.

We hashed this over for about an hour, never saying that the whole issue was about A. and the wallet-slinging.  We decided that it's not in the proper spirit of our town to discourage the public from committee meetings.  But we voted to limit public comment to periods well before and after we vote on issues, so the public can't be seen as a lobbying influence.

A few days later I ran into D. and her husband at the store.  D. and I stood in the wine aisle talking about the wallet-slinging, and D. fumed that A. and his conservative buddies sit in the little gazebo on slats that they built to stand in for the town's recently closed coffee-shop.  "Every morning they sit up there in that Think Tank and carp about how this town is going to the dogs; they just work themselves into a frenzy!" she said. I said it could be that or the glue A. uses in his one-room, unvented woodworking studio (I'd noticed a new facial tic in A. the last few months).

Whatever it is, people get more upset about taxes as we approach March's Town Meeting.  And I'm thinking that until I'm up to speed enough to know what issues and personalities I'm dealing with, maybe I should wear a football helmet to budgeting meetings.   

          

Comments

[Cowtown Pattie]

Hmmm, sorta like PTA meetings here in the Lone Star State. Last one I attended was back in 1999. Bitsey Skinner flung a toothbrush at the executive council seated up on stage; she was hoppin' mad that her little darlin', Bernadette, was issued one to take home. She didn't realize that the whole elementary school got 'em free from a local dentist - she thought someone had complained about Precious Daughter's oral hygiene. 'Course, if you saw her daddy's chompers, or lack thereof, one could rightly suppose a gift of both toothbrush and a big ol' honking tube of fluoride toothpaste might be more than appreciated in the Skinner domicile. The only thing that saved that meetin' was the passing of some day old Krispie Kreme doughnuts. Bitsey might refuse free toothbrushes, but pastries on the house was another matter entirely. What self-respectin' PTA congregation doesn't have stale doughnuts and that special pink Kool-Aid for refreshment?

I've served my time as a public servant. They don't call 'em "servants" for nuthin', you know.

Hang tough, Madam Councilwoman! Onward!

[Tillerman]

You have my sympathy. What a thankless task. As an ex-volunteer on committees in my own town I sometomes wonder that anyone volunteers for local government any more. There's always some troll who takes a delight in carping from the sidelines while avoiding real responsibility himself.

[Tabor]

I am so bad as a citizen of my community. I am hard working but I absolutely am allergic to the politics of these committees. I get to the point where I can't sleep nights! So put me on the committee to ount the money or take it to the bank!