The following quotes are excerpted from the masthead editorial of Thursday June 8, 2006's Rutland Herald....
I.
"With [revised 2006] property values up 57 percent and the city budget up 18 percent, Rutland City residents may have the feeling they are looking at a perfect storm of financial furies.
The last [property value] reappraisal in the city occurred in 1988, and at that time property values increased 40 percent. So it is not surprising, given the overall boom in real estate prices, that property values have risen 57 percent in the period since then."
Agreed. I cannot understand why Rutland taxpayers are actually shocked that real estate values have increased 57 percent over nearly twenty years. Hel-lo! Same message to Bratt taxpayers: I couldn't believe how surprised and indignant property owners were here in 2005, seeing the increases they did. Ten years between assessments? Bonus! For years and years they had been getting away with paying antiquated, old-school tax rates on very modern, state-of-the-art, overinflated-yet-very-real, trendily high property values. (We wanted them to come and spend tourist dollars, not property ownership dollars..... ah, what an unjust fox-in-henhouse)...
This is not to say that everyone deserves the high taxes commensurate with our towering property values. This is to say, that the strength and feasibility of our budget is dependent on the taxes levied, and if you're paying a ridiculously antiquated tax rate, you're going to end up with nothing in the coffers. And surrounded by an ever-increasingly high-cost world, with no high revenues to sustain it. But with a bunch of happy taxpayers! Not worth it. Instead, property values in this city (and heavens, when are we going to admit that we're a city, and function accordingly?) should be reassessed every three to four years, conservatively.
[And may I interject here, that I am one of the fifty-one percent majority of Brattleboro adults who are residential tenants. Therefore also, I am one of the majority of Brattleboro voters who incur the major costs of taxation that are "passed down to the ratepayer," as they like to call it in the electricity and telecommunications industries. So while a property taxpayer may have more direct vestiture in the reassessment tax costs, they certainly do not incur it alone, and I am glad to speak as one of the majority, who are, through exORBITantly high residential lease rates here, majorily responsible for paying Brattleboro property taxes. :^]
II.
The nervousness that Rutlanders feel as a result of the reappraisal has been worsened by the budget turmoul in City Hall. The roof has fallen in on the city budget - and that is meant in a literal sense. The city has had to budget $300,000 simply for interest on a loan to pay to keep the roof on the city's water treatment plant from caving in."
Boy, and I thought that we were compromised by a $45,000 interest payment for our water/sewer deficit.
III.
"The city is also faced with payments of about $1 million a year for five years to pay off a $5 MILLION DEFICIT IN THE WATER AND SEWER FUNDS." (my allcaps)
Speaking of resort living at trailer park prices, the water and sewer cost-per-taxpayer in this town, which incurred a four (4%) increase in 2005, had not been raised since 1993. Ninety-three. Can anyone complaining about the unsustainable nature of Brattleboro's 'water and sewer fund' deny that the cost of operating these massive infrastructural facilities is gonna go up, and wear down, by more than zero in twelve years??
And even if we find another missing $150K deficit on the W & S ledger as we just lately have....... it sure as hell beats the $5 Million that Rutland's W & S account is down by. Holy smokes, our deficit is more like to equalling the interest payment on their deficit, of $300K.
So yes, we need massive accounting and auditing. And yes, we need to merge (as, clearly, do all Vermont towns please) into the 21st century and step away from the index cards and typewriters, and toward the electronic datasystem. Ours, like all other datasystems, will take about a year and a half to fully implement. I am not sure but I believe that we're halfway to two-thirds into that implementation process.
The major difference between using our current and traditional accounting system ( =, an abacus) and using the upcoming datasystem ( =, an Apple) to calculate expenses and expenditures is the speed with which one can make decisions. That's the key. Datasystems can generate reporting 100 times per day for six months, if so queried, for probably the same cost as having a human generate one such report, once. The speed with which we will have information and therefore intelligence to make better decisions will be exponentially greater than any we've had before. However until then, we are restricted to bad decisions because we have bad data. Period.
In my career I have been involved in probably 25 or 30 migrations from one datasystem to another one altogether, or from a manual, paper-based nightmare to a networked datasystem. such as Brattleboro is performing. In every single one of these migrations, hellific chaos ensues. Every single error of every single transaction that the business or organization wishes to represent within their new system becomes glaringly evident during the process known as "cleaning up the data." Most manual or antiquated data is filthy. Or otherwise known as "human error." You find lots of them when you move to transfer thousands or millions of datapoints into a spanking new and empty, highly well-designed datasystem. I am pretty certain that the Town found a lot of filth and gunk all over their non-standardized, manually maintained (or, not so much) and extremely, incredibly complex datasets. A muddied mess. Which has been, since the beginning of the Town's datasystem implementation process, all coming to light.
And like most data worth keeping track of, all that mucky data equals somehow, in some capacity, lost money, lost efficiency, lost information, lost opportunities at good decisionmaking, and more lost money. I am very interested to learn more about the status of this implementation, and hope that the datasystem purchased was well-chosen with more vision than frugality.
IV.
"There are other expenses [in Rutland], such as a new employee to beef up operations in the city Treasurer's Office in response to recent budget problems."
Well, since we're the city that eats like a town, Brattleboro is starving itself of a Treasurer's Office. Rutland's hiring additional finance personnel, and Brattleboro's considering layoffs.
I think we ought to begin a revenue increase with a.) a really big tag sale; b.) Rolf's loving and very interesting foundation idea; and c.) denying the Brattleboro Area Land Trust's request for a non-reimbursable $.75 Million dollar grant, and create a way or two to incentivize and satisfy the requirements of this (and any and all other) federal money, in a way that will get some revenue produced here with tha quickness.
This town is filled with brilliant and creative people who love Brattleboro and all its occupants. In addition to asking the Vermont League of Cities and Towns and Mr. Douglas why all municipalities are tanking it bigtime with NO backup from the State.... to the Town of Brattleboro: what may we do to help?
I hope the answer is, a suggestion that we vote to hang onto the Town's state tax payment owed to Montpelier, thusly saving time and money on the grant-funding-trickle-down process... and just keep our own money to tend to our own, and cut out the grant-disbursing middlemen! :^)
Heather Freedman
District 1