Vacuuming up the leaves

Is there anything more ridiculous than the West Hartford Taxpayers Association?

It demands that we cut, cut, cut and then, when cuts are made, it screams NO! NOT THAT!

For Judy Aron, its vice president, to tell The Hartfor Courant that eliminating curbside leaf  vacuum truck pickup is “a direct hit on our senior citizens” is both silly and stupid.

To use it as justification for seeking another budget vote is so stunningly obtuse that I can’t believe even this group could make the argument.

First off, the vacuum pickup is a luxury that most towns don’t do. We’re constantly told by people like Aron that we can’t afford these extra anymore, but when one is cut, she howls. Give me a break.

Even more than that, though, is the simple reality that the service should be stopped. Why should the town go around sucking up leaves? It’s far better that they get bagged and hauled off instead of blowing all over the neighborhood, clogging up storm drains, and presenting potentially deadly piles for children to hide in IN THE STREET. Plus I won’t miss the whirring noise of the damn things on otherwise delightful autumn days.

Anyway, Judy, your credibility is shot now.

The town made a reasonable decision on how to save some money without hurting the community. It’s a harship for some, sure, though I don’t think the elderly are taking a bigger hit than anyone else on it. Perhaps it’s just that you want the cuts to hurt only the children?

 

The budget debacle

There’s something seriously wrong if taxpayers have gunned two straight budgets by wide margins.

So what is it?

One could argue that the problem is that town leaders are simply trying to spend more money than residents are willing to support. This clearly has some truth to it, but it’s simplistic.

Another alternative is that people are struggling financially and, given the choice, are going to try to lower what bills they can. Again, there’s truth in that. None of us want to pay more, particularly when the cost of everything seems to be rising a whole lot faster than paychecks.

But I think the real reason that the budgets are getting clobbered is that we generally don’t feel as if we are getting the information we need before we agree to pay so much more. Sure, the town puts budget information online, but it’s presented in a way that only an accountant could love. And nowhere do we get simple data on the questions people are always asking – how much do employees make? What kind of health care do they get and how much do they pay? What kind of pensions are we handing out and how much does that cost each year? And on the education side, we really want to see much more, because it does seem preposterous that the charges go up so much every year while student numbers stay relatively stable. Explain that to us, please, in painstaking detail.

I’m a supporter of the schools, a backer of the budget, a yes voter to my core. But I’m also confused and upset that my neighbors have so many questions and there are so few answers. Relying on us to trust our elected leaders obviously isn’t enough to get a spending plan passed.

Give us some help, town council members. Let’s delve into the details, school board members. Make it possible for those who want to see the required spending supported to sell skeptical friends, neighbors and others.

The budget. Round One.

I need to get caught up on what’s happening with the budget so I won’t venture any opinions other than this: I know a fight is looming.

But I’m sure those who are paying attention would like a new thread that focuses on the issue, so here it is.

Here are some key documents, which I need to read:

Town manager’s proposed budget

School superintendent’s budget proposal

Town manager’s March 11 budget presentation

Budget in Brief

Capital Improvement Budget

I do have to give credit to our town officials for putting all this information online so that we can easily dig through it.

Property tax estimator

A total waste of money and a travesty

I learned today — thanks to a sharp-eared parent at a school’s opening day event — that the Board of Education is paying to have full-time security greeters at every elementary school this year. The logic, apparently, is that having someone there to be “security” will keep our kids safer.

Well, phooey.

I’ve been in the schools enough to know that almost every adult who walks in is known to the secretaries. They sign in at the office and either proceed to wherever they’re going or the necessary calls are made. There’s nothing a security person can do that isn’t already being done.

This just infuriates me because this year we didn’t have money for Middle School Quest. We almost slashed away expanded languages for elementary schools. We pared needed positions at Smith and Charter Oak. We had a big fight over every dollar.

And now it turns out that hundreds of thousands of dollars are being squandered on security personnel who are doing nothing of any value to protect children from threats that don’t exist.

I find it almost sickening that we’re sending a message to our kids and ourselves that we no longer trust the community to look after schoolchildren, that we need security in schools to keep an eye on all of us. We’re bringing distrust into a place that depends on trust.

I want to know how this happened and why it’s being allowed. There are so many educational needs that are not being met that I can scarcely believe money existed for this mind-boggling move.

Fire the security guards and fund some more teachers. Let’s put our dollars where our priorities are.

$188K for school boss

Well, I hope the man is worth it. Read the details here.

David Sklarz is getting a 3.5 percent pay hike that puts his salary on track to break $200K in another year or two. That’s hard to swallow when the district is doing things like cutting back on Quest and wiping out positions that would help kids directly.

Happy with the latest budget?

I’m still trying to find out details, but at least education doesn’t appear to be suffering as much as I feared.

Bye, Theresa! Taxpayer prez says she’s moving

“I myself am not able to afford to live in this town,” [Theresa] McGrath said. She said her agenda was to cut taxes. “I don’t want to move. I’m going to have to move,” she said.

Maybe I’m crazy, but if West Hartford Taxpayer co-prez Theresa McGrath is moving, why is she setting our community’s agenda? If she’s “going to have to move” then why is she given any attention at all? I can barely afford to stay, but I’m staying. She isn’t, apparently, so why do we care what she says?

Now the council needs to stand strong

The town council plans to hold a public comment hearing on how to revise the budget starting at 7:30 p.m.  The council itself will vote on Wednesday night.

“Residents are welcome to come and offer their views,” Mayor Scott Slifka told the Courant. “We want to make sure people know about it and that it will be televised.”

So what will happen? What should we tell the council? What should the council do?

My own suggestion is simple: don’t cut more from education.

Budget “adjustments” promise pain

The town manager laid out for the council what it will take to reach different tax hike percentages. Here’s a PDF of the information that the council got.

I imagine that once the council picks how much it wants to cut, the town manager and school superintendent will lay out what specific cuts can be made to reach the target. That’s the point where we’ll see the blood and hear the screams. It won’t be pretty.

For those who can’t bear to see the details, to cut the increase for most homeowners from 6.6 percent — the level of the adopted budget that voters gunned down — to 4.5 percent this year would require slashing $3.4 million from the existing spending plan. To get to a 3 percent tax hike means wiping out $5.8 million from the budget. A tax freeze would take $10.6 million.

The numbers are just plain scary.

Home values rise with test scores

A fascinating story in Sunday’s New York Times provides proof that school test scores make a huge difference in home prices, even within our tiny town.

Based on “new study by seven professors and students at Trinity College,” the story says the data proves that “prices within a town can fluctuate, even by neighborhood, based on the strength of the local elementary school,.”

Using information from 8,736 home sales between 1996 and 2005 in West Hartford, the study “examined the relationship between grade-school test scores and home prices” in each of the town’s 11 elementary school districts.

It found that as test scores rose, so did home prices “in specific and predictable increments.”

“In fact, every 12-percentage-point difference in scores on the Connecticut Mastery Tests, the standardized exams that students in Grades 3 through 8 take every year, is worth $5,065 to those buying or selling a home, according to the study, called ‘School Choice in Suburbia: Public School Testing and Private Real Estate Markets.’ the study determined.

As a result, the study found that the Bugbee district, which has homes that closely resemble those in the Whiting Lane district, has higher home prices because students at Bugbee score about 12 points higher on the CMTs.

Read the story. It’s fascinating.

There is in this, of course, all the proof that any rational person should need that spending money to improve our schools leads directly to higher home values. Let the scores slip and so do home prices.

People can complain all they like about property tax bills, but the reality is that we either pay for our schools through taxes and have great education for our kids or we pay for our schools through falling home values and have a lesser education for our kids. It’s as simple as that.

The only choice we don’t have is to keep housing prices up and taxes down. It ain’t happening, folks, however much we’d all like to have chocolate truffles growing on every dandelion.

If anyone can find a working link to the study, please post it!