How I Really Know Spring Has Arrived

My enjoyment of our first nice weekend day of spring, Saturday, came to an abrupt halt Sunday morning with the very less than spring-like weather we had as well as a headline in the newspaper on the doorstep, "Battle Brewing Over Norwich Schools Budget." 

I would hope you are as weary of my writing about our annual budget exercise as I am and yet, the more things change, the more we remain Norwich. I offered most of what follows quite a number of years back and then again, not too many years ago, and remain less than amazed at how little we've progressed despite past and present protestations and promises to the contrary. 

It was Einstein who said, "(w)e cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." However, the last time I checked, he never sought a seat on the City Council or Board of Education so I guess we could just ignore his advice.

Meanwhile, we’re searching for who’s to blame for the municipal budget that’s taking shape but the culprit can be found in the nearest mirror. We should know better, we go through this every year and yet because we don’t do things differently in the preceding eleven and half months we get to this point in the fiscal calendar every year and are amazed. Actually, and ignore my cynicism, we’re always disappointed about the results we didn’t get from the work we didn’t do. 

Every year we all get a case of the heebie-jeebies and vow to 'fix' this 'broken system' and then suffer amnesia when the crisis passes. As a matter of fact, since it's so familiar and recurs so often, I'm not sure if 'crisis' is even an appropriate word to describe it. Semantics aside, what next?

For right now we’ll scan the headlines perhaps more closely for local news than maybe we usually do and we'll talk about how we really should find the time this year to attend the public hearings the City Council and City Manager schedule for every municipal department as part of the budget preparation (the schedule is online on the city's website) but most of us won't. 

I meant to go to the Board of Education meeting for their proposed budget, but didn't, so I can't really talk can I? When all the shouting is over, and the muttering begins, we'll go back to muddling through with that same strained, stoic smile we always have because we've decided that doing nothing is somehow less painful than doing somehow to relieve the pain. Looks stupid when you read it, right? I felt pretty dumb typing it too, but here we are.

Better a horrible end, than horrors without end, I suppose, but this annual dance could end with very little effort if we could all sit and work together to solve our annual situation and then actually do it. It seems money talks. And some days you can't get a word in edgewise.

-bill kenny