Love those referendums
11 May—Litchfield’s annual budget meeting will be Thursday night, 14 May, at 7 p.m. in the misnamed Lakeview High School auditorium. Here’s the link to the call:
And here’s the link to the proposed budget:
Just like Region 20’s 2026-27 budget that sailed through three of the unprepared region’s four towns in last week’s referendum, Litchfield’s 2026-27 municipal budget is likely to fly through this week’s budget meeting unscathed. That’s because even though—again like the Region 20 budget—the town budget has been driven up at roughly double the rate of inflation and will result in almost a five-percent increase in the mill rate, virtually no active interest outside of understandably self-interested town boards has been shown in reducing or even analyzing it.
Not like the good old days when the town’s perennial pain-in-the-ass led the watchful cadres of civic-minded fiscal waste-fighting activists (mislabeled by big spenders as cheapskates) that pored over virtually all town and (especially) school board bare-bones budgets, found lots of meat to cut away, forced referendums, and usually got the budgets reduced.
Every once in a while we’d be able to cut budget waste simply by packing budget meetings and cutting line items, per statute and/or dexterous manipulation of parliamentary procedure. (By statute, budget items can be reduced—but not increased—at meetings. But if a referendum is forced, a budget may not be amended at the meeting that’s adjourned to that referendum because the referendum will have been called on a specified budget. Got it?)
I fondly recall the time I was threatened with physical violence after such a meeting—at which an education budget had been reduced—by an aggrieved teacher who didn’t realize Constable Dodgie Doyle was standing right behind him. And a time after a referendum that cut another school budget, when I found a Mary Kay Cosmetics bag containing a fair amount of dog poo (evidently from a larger breed) halfway up my driveway—doubtless from a school-child’s parent—who, a friend said, must have been shit-faced . . .
[Pedantic usage note: “Referendum” is the gerund of Latin “referre,” meaning “to refer.” A gerund—a verb acting as a noun ending in “-ing”—can’t have a plural. So the proper plural for “referendum” would—or should—be “referendums” rather than “referenda.” Like anybody cares.]