County government needs to live within its means

To the Editor:
    The numbers don’t lie and the figures contained in a couple of recent issues of this paper make very clear that many of the county’s citizens will be unable to keep up with the financial demands of the County Commissioners.
    Those who live on their Social Security benefits have received a 1.7 percent cost-of-living increase for the year 2015. Yet, a 2.25 percent pay increase was affirmed by the commissioners for three administrators and a handful of non-union employees. Overall the tax commitment will be higher by 3.74 percent.

    Have the commissioners given any thought to how these increases will affect fixed-income retirees and others with restricted financial resources? Does the law of “diminishing returns” have meaning for the county leadership? How much longer can they continue to extract taxpayer resources from a limited and diminishing income stream? Apparently the word austerity eludes those whose vocabulary ends with the word more.
    The county finance administrator, John Baiamonte, must have hit a tender nerve while addressing the commissioners on another topic. He told them how he’d frequently heard the phrase, “That’s just the way we’ve always done it.” How many times have we heard that bit of misguided philosophy? Is it possible that the same type of thinking was applied to the preparation of their latest budget? And with that increase at the county level, think what could be in store when towns and the schools demand increases and expect us to believe, “That’s just the way we’ve always done it.” Did Mr. Baiamonte inadvertently rock the financial boat to which so many county towns tenaciously cling?
    One doesn’t have to question whether that oft-repeated, “that’s just the way we’ve always done it,” is a perfect fit for the definition of insanity. That’s when something is done over and over in the same way, all the while expecting a different outcome. Has anyone attempted to think outside the box?
    In the county and its municipalities, it takes courage to address “the warts” in a long-standing method of doing things. Wasn’t the lion in The Wizard of Oz named Courage and didn’t he look for courage? Courage to ask questions, courage to deal and courage to stand for the truth? Might Mr. Baiamonte be just the lion the county needs?
    If only the county supervisors had the courage to not just listen and then repeat the same old way of doing things, but to act — to choose new ways to address the budget requests and to do so within the means of those required to pay the bills.
    Here’s a challenge to all those concerned with county, school and municipal budget development and implementation. This will take courage! Use the federally mandated cost-of-living adjustment Social Security recipients annually receive, and make that percentage an absolute ceiling, beyond which no budget will increase. In other words, force yourselves to live within the same means as many of those you require to pay the tax burden. Instead of penalizing taxpayers with onerous tax increases that surpass the financial resources of many citizens, hold the line and stop forcing folks to expend their savings or leave their homes. Stop pushing the “lifeblood” of the community closer to poverty for the sake of fulfilling bureaucratic lists.
    It’s worth recalling the sage wisdom of the nation’s first Supreme Court Justice John Marshall, who wrote, “… the power to tax involves the power to destroy.” 

Don Benjamin
Dover-Foxcroft