....After the hearing,
former town welfare administrator Maureen O’Reilly said that she hopes that more voters turn out than did so the last two Town Meetings — at each of which
voters rejected her proposals to raise $10,000 toward a fund to deal with the building’s problems.
“And this is where we are today,” O’Reilly said.
Looming over all proposals for spending is a second effort by members and allies of the libertarian Free State Project to sharply limit spending.
In an article for which he collected enough signatures to put on the warrant, resident
Jeremy Olson proposes a tax cap — under which the
Budget Committee could not recommend an increase in property taxes of more than 1 percent over the previous year’s spending package. The cap would remain in effect year to year, unless a 60-percent majority voted to repeal it.
In 2013, at a sparsely attended deliberative session 4½ weeks before Town Meeting,
Free State supporters won preliminary approval of a cut of more than $128,000 from the $954,000 budget that the
Selectboard and the
Budget Committee had recommended. Voters at the subsequent Town Meeting rejected that cut, leaving the town with a default budget of $940,000 — about the same amount of spending as the previous year.
Olson last year also proposed a warrant article for a tax cap, which failed to receive the 60-percent majority vote to go into effect. At Monday night’s hearing,
Olson said similar caps are working in Franklin and Manchester, under the state law allowing voters to institute them. He added that voters at the deliberative session could raise the cap to 2 percent or 3 percent.
O’Reilly described the cap as
“an insulting warrant article. Everybody works hard to keep their budgets low.”
Selectwoman
Jennie Joyce added that if the town had to face rising and unexpected expenses with a cap at below the rate of inflation, “we’d go to hell without the handbasket.”
http://www.vnews.com/news/10409782-95/town-offices-up-for-a-vote
