Letters

Published on July 10, 2009

Mixed-up priorities

To the Bulletin: In their most recent Amherst Center column, the authors discuss Town Meeting's approval of a budget that will board up a school, shut down pools, lay off teachers and town workers and "offload services for our poorest and hungriest to the vagaries of the grants process." These budget cuts were necessary, they write, because "we just don't have the dough."

The process, write the columnists, of "watching many of the things we love about Amherst being dismantled" was "painful" and "soul-killing."

It was also unnecessary, as these cuts were a matter of choice. While the columnists (who the Bulletin states seek "to portray local issues from a centrist perspective") detail the budget items they voted to cut, they do not discuss the budget items that in most cases all three, along with a majority of Town Meeting, voted to approve, among them:

" $170,000 for consultation fees and aerial mapping to support the town's four full-time planners;

" $140,000 for four new police cruisers;

" $65,000 for the restoration of four, and the display of two, Civil War tablets;

" $30,000 in Community Preservation Act funds for signs marking a "Writer's Walk Tour" of buildings associated with prominent literary figures who were town residents;

" an increase of $28,790 in the police station budget, "primarily due to increased utility costs required to cool added equipment in the communications center";

" an increase of $23,000 in the school superintendent's salary;

These items total $456,790; less than half that amount could have instead funded the following, which were cut:

" $66,000 for the entire Human Services budget, which supported the Amherst Survival Center, Big Brothers Big Sisters, the Center for New Americans, Cot Programs, Family Outreach of Amherst, Men's Resource Center, and Not Bread Alone;

" $52,000 to repair, open and operate the Memorial Pool;

" $50,000 to restore taxpayer-supported scholarships for children of low-income families to attend Amherst's summer camps;

" $34,704 to support the libraries at the state certification level and preventing Friday closings;

" $18,000 for the Senior Center's coordinator of more than 150 volunteers.

And a sixth-grader could tell us how many teacher's jobs, at $45,679 each, could have been saved with $456,790.

The "hard choices" supported by the Amherst Center columnists at Town Meeting represent a shift in Amherst's priorities with the poor, children and the elderly being prioritized last.

Kevin Eddings
Amherst