I once saw a sign that announced "We CAN DO anything. We CAN'T DO everything." I wish the Literacy Volunteers could've gone to more neighborhoods, y'know? In households and statehouses and in federal offices that idea and notion resonates, especially this year as needs explode and resources disappear. We watch TV news at night to help us place the price we pay for petroleum and all of the products made from petroleum into a broader context and that helps, but the price at the pumps still stings (and stinks).
We watch as state governments struggle to develop or refine budgets for fiscal years that start 1 July and fear in any number of ways more fingers will be reaching into our pockets to pay for the increased costs and use of goods and services. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., offered that 'taxes are the price we pay for civilization." That's as may be, but just me or are there days when we should ask for some (or all) of our tax money back?
Your town, wherever you are, is struggling with the same issues and the same challenges mine is. In Norwich, CT, Monday night, the City Council will debate and discuss and at least preliminarily decide an operating budget for 1 July 2008 through 30 June 2009. The Council's meeting agenda is right here and it's pretty ambitious. I passed along the home page for the City's site because it's gotten better and better in the last six months and it was pretty decent to start with. I like to show that off, even though I had nothing to do with it looking and working better (though that might actually be the reason why it is). A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and it doesn't always have to be a dance step.
Norwich, perhaps not so much like where you live, had a tabla rasa in terms of the composition of the City Council and in our City Manager's office. A lot of different people coalesced over shared ideas and ideals that they may not have fully appreciated or known they shared, to repopulate wholesale nearly all of the Council and those new (and old) alderpersons have been working with the new City Manager who started in his job practically the same night they started in theirs.
Two of the aldermen, Christopher Coutu, and Robert Zarnetske, suggested in newspapers last week that more editing and judicious resizing still needed to be pursued on a proposed budget, developed by the City Manager, reflecting the desires of the City Council. It will be interesting and educational to see where that discussion heads and what results it produces, not only on the agencies and programs throughout the City, but on the lives of the residents who live here and whose taxes pay for the goods and services. I would hope, as you might expect to be the case in a similar situation in your town, that I'll see a reasonable amount of heat as well as light produced by evening's end.
I would hope, and am relying on, other members of the City Council to join Messrs Coutu and Zarnetske in doing the right thing-even when, or if, it's NOT popular and to work for the residents and voters of ALL of Norwich. That is why I voted for the current members of the Norwich City Council in the first place. If doing the right thing were always easy, ANYONE could be in municipal government. But, because doing the right thing is NOT always easy, especially in municipal government, we, the voters, need to exercise care in whom we elect to lead us.
I felt very good about the choices I made for voices when I voted in November and have had little to no reason for misgivings or disquiet since. That doesn't mean I have agreed with every decision the aldermen have made nor do I think we'll all go shoe-shopping when the budget deliberations conclude. Not really the point and I'd be letting them down if I pretended it were otherwise. I'd hope that at the Norwich City Council meeting Monday there could be a consensus that this is a moment where circumstances and conditions have combined to force EVERYONE to manage with fewer resources and fewer dollars.
I doubt that this (or any) City Council WANTS reduced budgets to be, or become, the norm or seen as the desired outcome, but because a city's citizens need a respite from a municipal system that many perceive as too expensive for them to continue to finance it. Other voices in other places need to be heard over the usual supplicants.
I want at all levels of government (including and most especially at the Presidential) for those in office, and for those seeking office, to say what they mean and to mean what they say. In addition to being dangerously close to a cliché, we the people, owe to our elected representatives the courtesy of feedback-when we like their actions and when we don't. By choosing dialogue over diatribe we make where each of us lives a better place for all of us to live.
-bill kenny
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