Apparently I'm a fiscal conservative now?
Democracy begins at home, y'all!
Editor’s advisory: this column includes wonky commentary on local politics. I’m doing my best to keep it fun for non-Brattleburghers, but if it’s not your cup of tea, don’t panic! I’ll be back in a couple days with my usual commentary on life, the universe, and everything and stuff.
Crack open the nest eggs! Smash the piggy bank! Raid the economic development fund!
Why, you ask? Well, there’s a sudden! emergency! And the only possible response is massive new spending on policing!—according to the Selectboard in Brattleboro, Vermont, at least (the Selectboard is our equivalent of a city council).
On top of the terrible, short-sighted decisions aforementioned, the Selectboard’s proposed spending plan for the next fiscal year cuts a crapton of vital services and programs that are not the police. And what do we get in exchange for these cuts?
A 12% tax hike! Woohoo!
Wait. We’re losing services and taxes are going up?
Yes, I did hear that right?
In that case … um, sorry, no deal.
Brattleboro is weird. Me being a fiscal conservative is possibly weirder.
Most towns in Vermont enjoy direct democracy. On the first Tuesday in March (a.k.a. Town Meeting Day), people show up with their seat cushions, their knitting, and their pocket guides to Robert’s Rules to deliberate and debate in grange halls, municipal buildings, high school gymnasiums, and other public spaces—one morning, one person, one vote. Lots of motions come up, but the core function of a Town Meeting in Vermont is to ratify the budget proposed by their Selectboard.
But Brattleboro is unique, and proud of it—a real weirdo’s weirdo.
Among other unique things, we do not enjoy direct democracy. Instead, we have Representative Town Meeting (RTM), with ~150 members elected by people who live in the same voting district.
I’ve been on RTM since 2013, and I have never seen anything like the mismanagement happening right now. Regardless of how you feel about police spending, the way the Selectboard has chosen to pay for this spending is outrageous—as is the ridiculous emergency declaration used to rationalize it.
I never thought I’d be the fiscal conservative in the room, but here we are, I guess!
In which I pick up my pen sword
The proposed FY26 budget is tangled up in a Gordian knot of unwise decisions. I believe we need to slash straight through that knot by voting “nay” on the budget on March 22.
Again, this is not just because I am against massive new spending on policing.
Full disclosure, though: I would like to see money spent on housing, food, mental health care, and alternative ways to keep our community safe without entangling cops when they’re not needed. (Cops would likely also prefer not to be entangled when they’re not needed.)
However. Even if our elected officials had the ability (questionable) and the inclination (definitely absent) to deal with this alleged public-safety emergency with more housing, food, and mental health care, I would still want to slash this budget apart. Sure, it would hurt worse, but I would do it anyway.
Why? Let me explain.
To implement their FY26 spending plan, the Selectboard and Town Manager would:
Gut our rainy-day fund—at a time when climate change is accelerating.
Abuse the revolving loan fund for one-time spending—even though this fund is a self-replenishing account designated for economic development, and even though it originated long ago with federal grants whose like we will probably never see again in this lifetime.
Tap into savings accounts that were set aside for other uses—for example, paying for a backhoe with funds that have been tucked away for unforeseen infrastructure projects, not for regular purchases of equipment.
As mentioned, despite raising taxes more than 12% compared with FY25, the proposed budget also embeds a cluster of nickel-and-dime cuts to services and programming. Below is a selection from a longer list (if you’re interested enough to see the whole thing, you will find an addendum on pages 30 to 32 of the RTM Finance Committee’s FY26 report, which I helped the committee edit). The major reductions are in three categories.
The proposed budget would cut programs that help us weather climate change impacts:
Skipping our annual contribution to the Global Warming Solutions Fund
Reducing snowstorm cleanup
Reducing planned stormwater upgrades
Eliminating leaf collection
The budget proposal decreases services that keep us safe and save us money in the long run:
Spending less on traffic safety, line striping, and street signs
Cutting capital improvements to bike infrastructure
Reducing planned pay raises for Town staff
Deferring maintenance at the library and fire stations
Deferring planned equipment purchases and loan payoffs
A “yea” vote is also a vote for slashing programs that promote accessibility, literacy, and quality of life:
Firing the ASL interpreters at Selectboard meetings and switching to Zoom’s AI captioning
Eliminating the Town Arts Fund
Reducing the library budget for reference resources as well as both juvenile and adult books
Suspending vacation buybacks for Town employees
Cracks in our fiscal foundation?
In addition to all this, for the first time since I joined RTM, the independent auditor’s report reviewing last year’s spending pointed out small but meaningful cracks in the foundations of our financial reporting. The auditor (Batchelder Associates, PC) noted two “significant deficiencies,” which are are yellow flags, not red ones. The latter are called “material weaknesses,” and the auditor did not find any of those—yet.
Town staff have downplayed the importance of these deficiencies, but I’ve never seen anything like it—and I’ve served multiple years on the RTM Finance Committee, which is legally obligated to review the auditor’s report. Usually it’s just a one-line shrug. Nice job, another gold star, blah blah blah.
Oops, not this year!
One deficiency the auditor noted was “inadequate oversight and a lack of documented internal controls” regarding a loan, resulting in misstatements about cash and liabilities. The other deficiency was more general, involving lack of oversight when documents were being prepared, resulting in “financial misstatements affecting the accuracy and reliability of the [Town]’s financial statements.”
As mentioned, these are considered minor infractions, not major ones. But when I hear the phrase “financial misstatements” on top of the financial mismanagement I recorded above, this auditor’s report worries me.
It worries me a hell of a lot.
What happens if we smack this budget down?
If RTM votes the budget down, the new Selectboard (from which two incumbents were ousted on Election Day with shockingly low vote counts) will propose a new one, and Representative Town Meeting will have to meet again to approve a new budget before FY26 begins on July 1.
Let’s just get this out there: I’m pissed af that the current Selectboard is wasting my precious weekend on this terrible spending package. And I do not want to spend a second precious weekend of my life debating and voting on a new and more hastily prepared budget.
But I’ll do it if I have to. That prospect is part of what we all signed up for when we put our names on the ballot.
Voting “nay” on the budget would send a message to new Selectboard members and incumbents alike. But this vote is far more than a message: it is necessary to prevent mismanagement of our money, which we’ve entrusted to our leaders to spend—and save—judiciously.
Regardless of where you live, Town Meeting is not just a rubber stamp and should not be treated as one. Although town meetings have little direct power over the policies a proposed budget represents and funds, we vote on the budget for a reason. The money being spent is The People’s money. Not the Selectboard’s. Not the Town Manager’s. Ours. As RTM members, representing constituents who have elected us to these posts, we have a solemn duty to ensure the budget we approve is fiscally responsible.
This one is not.
I hope other RTM members will stand with me on Saturday and vote no on Article 12. If you are not an RTM member, please contact your RTM reps and encourage them to take a long, hard look at the budget, the Finance Committee’s report, and the independent auditor’s report before Saturday.
They—we—owe that to you and to ourselves.
And if you’re not even from Brattleboro and you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ve learned all about local government and how important it is to stay far, far away from it participate!
I suppose everyone in Brattleboro is entitled to be just as pissed off as they want to be, and there’s no shortage of things to be pissed if about. After all, being pissed off has supplanted baseball (and everything else) as our national pastime. But you’re arriving at the budget discussion in the ninth inning.
Criticizing the budget is definitely legit, but I think you need to be more specific in talking about what you would do differently. For example, to reduce our use of reserve funds to pay for things (a criticism I frequently made during the past six months), are you in favor of further cuts in our expenditures, or in favor of raising taxes even more? It’s got to be one or the other. And if you’re against the cuts we already made, what cuts would you make instead?
Being angry, and hating on the selectboard, are fine, but that’s the low-hanging fruit with regard to actually changing anything. You can get up at RTM and advocate defeating the budget, but that would basically bring town government grinding to a halt while town staff and a new selectboard try to come to grips with writing a new budget in a compressed time frame without any procedures in place for how to do that.
I think, and have said on numerous occasions, that we need to engage in an augmented discussion of town priorities as part of a longer, more detailed and forward looking budget process for FY27 and beyond.
Your proposal is the opposite. Effectively you’re saying let’s put together a whole new budget process during the next three months, when in fact we need that time for numerous other responsibilities (parking system and utilities budgets, along with many more), as well as to begin thinking about the FY27 budget process.
I thought long and hard before voting to approve sending the FY26 budget on to RTM for consideration. I attended several Finance Committee meetings, too, and I think their report this year is exceptionally strong. In the end, though, I concluded that the FY26 proposed budget should be passed, and then we should focus on doing better in FY27. Your proposed defeat of the budget will give us a truncated FY26 process and significantly diminish the FY27 process as well, the worst of both worlds.
I imagine you disagree with this formulation, and with only three days until RTM, it seems unlikely you’ll change your point of view. But I sure wish we had had time to talk about this along the way. (We still can, of course, and I’ll be conducting my office hours as usual this Wednesday and Friday.) Bringing in a whole new team in the ninth inning may be a dramatic statement of dissatisfaction, but I don’t think it’s going to lead to a successful outcome for the town.