Voters need to consider this

Friday, February 10, 2012

In last week’s Bedford Journal, we carried an op-ed piece by Richard Evans dealing with warrant Article 10, a citizens’ petition that will appear on the March ballot. Evans says approval “could act to slow the explosive growth of school district expenditure by restricting the use of budget surplus.”

The concern is the use of “surplus” money to fund projects not in the budget nor, as Evans puts it, approved by voters. He wrote, “Last year, voters allocated $300,000 of the surplus to be used at the board’s discretion for maintenance purposes. Yet, at the end of the year, rather than use what had been approved, the board withdrew an additional $386,000.”

Now, Evans has a distinctly cynical view of this practice, calling it a “bait and switch tactic of padding some large accounts and then diverting the inevitable surplus to wish-list items in economically challenging times.”

We certainly would not ask voters to subscribe to such a point of view, but we would ask school officials to think about this: Is Evans alone in holding this point of view? That seems unlikely, if for no other reason than he alone couldn’t get a petition warrant article onto the ballot.

So, at least some folks in town are less than laudatory toward these actions, and perception being what it is, officials need to be at least cognizant. The major currency of small-town government is not money, but trust, primarily because it is more difficult to earn once it’s been spent. It’s the old “Fool me once, etc.” concept, and it is no less real in a place like Bedford than it is anywhere else. Trust is what we spend in small-town government, and with it we need to be even more frugal than we are with money.

We don’t really think that the school district is run by a group of people practiced in the art of bait and switch. We assume that they have the same monetary concerns as does Evans and those who signed the petition.

But perception is perception, and this one, as expressed by Evans last week, is at best unfortunate.