Same Movie, Different Cast

Monday night the City Council completed the most important job it has and for which we chose them in last fall's election: approving our municipal budget. I've followed this process for almost three decades and it never gets any easier or less pain-filled and Monday night's deliberations and discussions proved that point again.  

The COVID-19 pandemic and its repercussions made (and will continue to make) every aspect of our lives much more difficult and the impact on the city's services, expenses, and revenues elevated the degree of this year's budget difficulties. If you don't have time to read the rest of this column, I’ll cut to the chase: no one is happy with the final results. 

That said, and stop me when you’ve read this before, despite our unhappiness at the moment we will repeat the same contentious conflicts on spending and services every year because all we do is talk about change without actually changing (and yes, it’s easy for me to say that as I don’t have to do it).

When you’re on the City Council, the buck, or what’s left of it, stops there. Whether we elected Republicans or Democrats last November, everyone is a Norwich neighbor when they sit at a desk in the front of Council Chambers. And all have to ask themselves ‘how do I make Norwich a place to come home to?’

That’s not a hypothetical question, and it’s certainly not an easy one to answer when posed to a property owner, a parent with school-age children, a small business operator and all the other people with whom we share our city. Reconciling those answers and developing a fair and equitable path forward is the goal but it involves heavy lifting.

People prefer a problem that's familiar to a solution that’s not. We are and should be, concerned at what we pay in taxes for what we receive in services, but after we've said we're angry about one or the other (we rarely if ever complain about one and the other), we seem to resign ourselves to whatever is about to unfold and leave our protests at that, until the next year.

The City Council and the Board of Education created an Ad Hoc Committee to start building a bridge of communication to replace the wall of mistrust and I’d like to see that process formalized so that it continues and grows.

But there’s a lot more work to be done to make ourselves more transparent and responsive with better-defined responsibilities and accountability from public safety through infrastructure and it takes all of us. When we finger-point as part of the blame-game instead of rolling up a sleeve and extending a helping hand, we cannot be surprised that we continue to have the same situations and the same challenges.

Norwich isn’t just the grand list, number of schools or fire engines, and taxes though all of those are part of who we are. It’s about opportunity and quality of life for every resident. So, let’s stop talking about how much we need to change and actually do it. There can be no greater need nor better time than now.

-bill kenny