Amherst Center: Cognitive dissonance

Published on May 30, 2008

It's that time of year again. Time for Town Meeting, which means time for approving our town budget, which means time for hand-wringing. This year's installment of our budgetary passion play has time-honored plotlines as well as some new ones - but all of them involve the same core dilemma: We want to do more, but we apparently aren't willing to do what it takes to pay for it.

The four boards (Select Board, School Committee, library trustees and Finance Committee) came into Town Meeting with a consensus script for the budget play, carefully and painfully balanced to match existing revenues with the help of $400,000 from the town's rainy-day reserves fund. And then the parade of truly sad stories and hopeful amendments began.

Town Meeting members spoke of the overtime and understaffed shifts in our Police Department, fearing increases in "real" crime such as assaults and robberies, not just drunken college kids passed out on front lawns. Members decried our shrinking investment in Community Services, which help our neediest townspeople - the poor, the homeless, the hungry - at a time when more and more of our neighbors are in need.

Cuts to the libraries provoked an even greater outcry than those to the poor and hungry. A 2 percent increase is not enough to prevent the Jones Library from closing down on Mondays, and members don't like it. And members rose to complain about a bumper crop of potholes - we cannot live in a town where the streets look like Kabul; we must increase the paving budget.

The latest scene in our spring play is "The Lunch Ladies." Having cut teachers, aides, an assistant superintendent, curriculum director and textbooks to little outcry, the School Committee was slammed for moving cafeteria workers off the district payroll in an effort to avoid further cuts to the core teaching staff in future years.

The schools don't have the staff to run an in-house program, but we don't like outsourcing the people who feed our children, either.

These are all the impacts of increased costs - mostly health care and energy - and revenues that do not keep pace. In the face of these cost increases, we have only two choices: raise revenues or cut costs/services. Last spring's failed override wrote the script for this spring's Town Meeting. As override opponents put it, we now have to "live within our means."

One of the most interesting subplots is watching members who opposed last year's override - in fact, actively worked to defeat it - now ask for increases to the budget. Some have also voted against sensible economic development zoning, which could help raise revenue without raising taxes. What exactly do they think "live within our means" means?

Friends, our town is suffering from a textbook case of cognitive dissonance (definition: "anxiety that results from simultaneously holding contradictory or otherwise incompatible attitudes, beliefs or the like"). Even in Amherst, "reality" occasionally rears its head. And our reality is that since our costs are increasing and state aid isn't keeping pace, we either have to make some more cash or stop bemoaning our spending cuts.

But it's not just the fault of those Town Meeting members who worked against the override, voted against economic development, and now want to increase budgets. We are all responsible. The majority of townspeople who do not vote, those that voted against the tax increase, those that vote for Town Meeting members who in turn vote irrationally, and those who shrug and say, ahh, that's Amherst. Yes, we are all enablers of our town's cognitive dissonance.

At the School Committee meeting last week where the cafeteria workers' outsourcing was discussed, a School Committee member asked the audience where the money should come from to restore these positions. An audience member replied, "That's not our job, that's yours." We disagree. Adequately funding our town to pay for the services we demand is a job for all of us.

The good news is, the end of this play is not yet written. A newly appointed community task force has begun meeting to tackle the big questions: What are our priorities as a town? And how are we going to fund them? With a broad range of Amherst neighbors at work on this task force, we wish them well and look forward to the results.

What choices would you tell them to make? What are you willing to pay for? Maybe it's time for you to join in the show.

Amherst Center is a monthly column addressing local issues from a centrist point of view. It is written by Town Meeting members Baer Tierkel and Clare Bertrand and School Committee member Andy Churchill.