Who is Talking About Layoffs?

People who are against giving money back to taxpayers are thinking of any "hot buttons" they can push to get people to support their position. Their latest is to raise the red flag of "layoffs" and "cuts in service" and similar scare tactics.

The truth is that no one knows what will happen in the months to come as town budgets are build and developed. We don't know what will happen to state aid. We don't know if the economy is going to get worse. We certainly don't know whether we can decrease the growth in spending because, frankly, our town leaders haven't tried to do that yet.

But what we do know is that NO BUDGETS will be changed this year. Period.

Between now and April, the town will go through its budget cycle. We have offered ideas for ways to balance the budget without using reserves and without resorting to overrides. That is one alternative. There are others.

Town officials could decide that budgets simply can't grow less than 6% per year. We would be surprised at that conclusion, but it is possible that could be the right decision. If that is the case, we would need to ask voters for an override this spring.

Using reserves to finance a hidden budget deficit only pushes the imbalance out for another budget cycle. This is dangerous because the problem can grow. We do not believe the town should finance deficit spending using reserves.

Why is deficit spending harmful? Let's say that the budget deficit is $1 million. Rather than raising revenues (override) or reducing costs (and there are many options there, see below), we simply finance the deficit using reserves.

The next year, the deficit remains but has grown with inflation. On top of that, assuming we still don't make any tough decisions, we have another $1 million imbalance plus the new $1 million in growth, so now the deficit is larger than $2 million. We use reserves again to "balance" the books.

In year three, the deficit is well over $3 million and now our reserves have been nearly exhausted. We no longer can take "small steps" to reduce costs because the deficit is over $3 million, far too large to handle that way. We can't continue financing the deficit because reserves are gone, so we need a very large override. If the override fails, there will be significant and painful cutbacks.

This could be one reason why the Mass. Dept. of Revenue advises towns not to use one-time reserves for recurring operations.

Acton Voters Group does not want that scenario to happen again. (It happened just three years ago.) While many of us do not like overrides either, proposing an override isn't our choice to make. We don't create or propose budgets to Town Meeting. Our role is to comment and offer what we think are better alternatives.

It is very early in the budget cycle; in fact, it has just started. It is far too early to even speculate on what steps will be needed to balance next year's budget.

If our town boards agree with us that budget growth should be less than 6%, laying off staff should be the last resort. We have proposed several alternatives that would reduce the growth in spending without layoffs.

These alternatives include a hiring freeze, negotiating lower salaries and benefits for our town and school employees, looking for inefficiencies and redundancies in town/school services, increasing revenue through creative methods that other towns utilize, stopping any spending outside of approved budgets after budgets have been approved by Town Meeting, and reprioritizing projects so that "nice to have" projects are put on hold until all of our "high priority" projects are completed.

Here's an example. Town Meeting just approved new boilers and univents, paying for them with 20-year bonds. These payments are about $110,000 per year. The changing rooms for NARA park entertainers would have just about paid for a full year of these bond payments alone. The cobblestone crosswalk would have paid for another year.

Talk of layoffs is premature for where we are. And while Acton Voters Group would prefer to see spending grow more slowly, it is up to the boards to construct and propose budgets for next year. We hope they will heed our advice, but ultimately, it will be up to April 2009 Town Meeting to decide what next year's budgets will be.

Voting YES to lower property taxes this year will have no effect on this year's budgets and next year's budgets are very much still to be determined. Don't let scare tactics influence your vote.