A Break in the Battle

We're less than a month away from the serious part of the municipal calendar-when the elected leadership of the City Council together with the City Manager and his professional department directors sit down as the Board of Education and its Superintendent of Schools have done and prioritize and finalize funding requests, analyze the costs of goods and services and calculate and create an annual municipal operating budget.

If you've lived here a year, a decade or a lifetime, you already know how this works. And across the country, perhaps there are variations in the calendar, but it's pretty much the same movie with a different cast. And speaking of movies, the plot rarely changes and the outcome, despite being known in advance is often still a struggle to accept.

We, the people, want as much as we can have from teachers through paved roads, secure bridges and tunnels to public safety professionals and equipment without having to pay any more for any of it than we already are. Ask anyone anywhere how much he/she pays in taxes and the answer (say it with me) is always 'too much.' Norwich is no exception, though we have many exceptional people.

A wag, living in a city not too unlike ours I suspect, once suggested if a fine is a tax for doing the wrong thing than a tax is a fine for doing the right thing. And if you've ever made a major improvement to your home or business, purchased new equipment or bought a new car, your property tax bill has probably made you a believer in that saying.

Where you think budget priorities should be set depends on who and where you are in the city. If you have a business, you'll want more investment for infrastructure and public safety. If you have kids in school you'll support the Board of Education's request for funding. And everywhere you go in terms of mission statements and dollars to accomplish those goals, every department across the city can make a case for why it has to have the exact number of dollars it has requested.

Our challenge as a city isn't so much our will to improve as the size of our wallet to purchase all the improvements we desire. If wanting to be successful were enough, we'd have a downtown jammed with destination stores crowded with people, generating rental income, sales taxes, utilities payments and enhancing not only our tax base but also our community's gross domestic product.

But until we have businesses willing to invest in moving to or enlarging their current Norwich address, much of the city's tax burden will be shouldered by the owners of private property-people who have been on the shortest end of the short stick of a terrible economy for too many years. Don't lose sight of a basic fact-when it was Boom Times here in the Land of the Round Door Knobs, it didn't quite boom so much in New England where all the infrastructure costs and investments were higher and larger and the good times weren't nearly as good or as long as they were elsewhere.

Drive-by slogans, bumper sticker mantras and simple solutions-whether in print from a once a week columnist or from anonymous on-line commentators at the bottom of those editorial observations aren't going to help the neighbors we chose as our representatives last fall as they sit in City Council chambers this spring and try to make the best decisions they can for the greatest number of residents.

Our representative system of government requires our participation in every budget hearing, in every workshop-don't leave it to somebody else- to both speak about our concerns and desires but also to listen to one another. Knowing the right thing to do isn't always the popular thing is of small solace when residents descend on a Council meeting with often competing demands for simultaneous increases and reductions in both services and taxes. We'd all like to lose ten pounds, but none of us like to diet. We can have both as long as we don't weigh ourselves and after we do, we have to agree to NOT blame the scale.
-bill kenny