Please take note: Bloggingbelmont’s new home.

Some of you may have noticed some weirdness with the B2 blog in recent weeks, as I’ve haphazardly gone about the process of moving this from a hosted WordPress blog over which I have very little control (thus the bloggingbelmont.wordpress.com URL) to a new home on its own domain over which I have much more flexibility to expand the features of the site. This is closing the loop on a process that I started way back in July, and frankly it’s not complete yet — I’m still going through and migrating links within the blog to point to the new domain. Some of you have commented in recent days, and I’ll make sure to copy those over to.

In any case, from here forward, make sure you’re pointing your browser to http://www.bloggingbelmont.com to enjoy the latest news and views from Bloggingbelmont. Thanks for helping to make this blog a success. I look forward to telling you more about the fun new features to come.

(Updated) No on Question 1? You betcha!

With all attention on the Presidential race, races and questions lower on the ballot are getting much less attention than they might otherwise. That’s especially true here in Massachusetts, where a whopper of a ballot initiative, Question 1, threatens to blast a hole in the State’s finances. For those of you who haven’t yet heard of Question 1 should familiarize yourself – in a hurry.

The text of Question 1 is fairly straight forward — voting “yes” would reduce the state personal income tax rate to 2.65% for all categories of taxable income for the tax year beginning on or after January 1, 2009, and would eliminate the tax for all tax years beginning on or after January 1, 2010. A “no” vote leaves the state income tax unchanged.

The question, which was put on the ballot by libertarian Carla Howell, Chairwoman of The Committee For Small Government and is similar to a previous proposal that failed but attracted significant support at the polls. Howell and supporters claim — without citing specifics — that removing the personal income tax, which would translate to an average savings of $3,700 for state taxpayers, and slash state revenues by approximately 40%, would “create hundreds of thousands of new Massachusetts jobs” while not raising property taxes or other taxes and that it wouldn’t require cuts to essential government services.

That last assertion is vigorously disputed by pretty much everyone who works in government at the state or local level. Opponents note that:

The $12 billion in lost revenue goes to support, among other things, critical services such as public safety (fire, police, paramedics), education, infrastructure improvement (roads and bridges), and healthcare for the sick and disabled and the elderly. In other words, the money would need to be replaced, or those critical services would be sacrificed — unsafe streets, crumbling bridges, crowded and ineffective classrooms, you name it.

The tree man cometh: fallen limb strikes car on Cross St.

Chalk this one up as a “near miss.” I had just finished up a long run on Sunday morning and was getting into the shower when I heard a “crash” outside and the sound of brakes, not to mention the shouts of the runners doing Brendan’s Home Run passing by on Cross St. When I looked out the window, I saw the reason: a huge limb had broken off a tree in front of my neighbor’s house, with part of the limb laying across the front of a car. As my neighbor explained it: the drivers of the car (mom, dad and their six year old) were new neighbors of ours further down on Cross. They had just moved in and were out for a Sunday drive.

As they turned off Farnham and started up Cross (slowly), this sucker dropped off a street tree, bounced on the road and landed an their car, denting their bumper. As often is the case with these things, the mind boggles at how much worse this could have been if the car had, say, been traveling at the 30mph or so that’s typical on Cross, or if it had been five or ten feet further down the road than it was when the limb fell.

This sucker was heavy – I could barely budge it and it took my neighbor, and both adult drivers of the car to pull it over to the side of the street. A truck from the town came by later in the day and removed the limb. Frankly – if it had landed on the passenger compartment with the car moving at a decent speed, this could have been a fatal accident. There was no wind to speak of when the limb fell, though it had been raining. Although my neighbor claims the town had come to inspect this tree recently, the limb appeared to have been badly worm eaten and weakened. My guess is that the weight of the heavy rains that morning and the wet leaves was what ultimately caused it to drop off.

I’m not sure if there’s any lesson here — limbs fall off trees all the time. Some of them fall on the roads. We all take chances every time we step outside our homes (or out of bed, for that matter.) I, personally, had a near miss with a falling icicle on Milk St. in Boston this past winter. If I’d lingered for 15 or 20 seconds at any point on my way back to my office, I’d have been killed — so what can you do? (I treated myself to Starbucks, in case you’re curious.)

On the other hand, I don’t think you can entirely chalk this stuff up to chance. The fact is: three decades ago, towns like Belmont and Watertown employed full time crews of employees just to manage their street trees. Those positions have long since been cut. Today, Belmont does better than most towns — contracting with a private company for tree maintenance. According to the most recent data, 74 dead and dangerous trees were removed in 2007, and other, storm damaged trees were repaired. Other maintenance was done in response to resident requests, according to the Tree Warden’s report. Day to day, care and maintenance of street trees isn’t something that most people notice or miss — until you see the 300 lb. tree limb break off and nearly kill someone — then you realize that the trees, like the roads, are all just public infrastructure and resources that need to be cared for and maintained. My 2c.

Guest perspective: Where was the Citizen Herald?

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest perspective from Town Meeting Member David Powelstock (Precinct 4) regarding the recent controversy over pay increases and promotions for two school administrators: Pat Aubin and Gerry Missal. The views and opinions stated represent the opinions of Mr. Powelstock.

In what is less a retraction than the latest in a series of single-minded attacks on the Belmont School Committee, the latest editorial in the Citizen-Herald seems surprised at their own inaccurate reporting last week of the textbook budget being “slashed to nearly nothing.” Instead of acknowledging its failure to check its facts, the Citizen-Herald instead implied that the restoration of this line item was kept as some kind of secret.

But the one-time funds that ultimately restored the proposed cuts to the textbook budget (among other items) were reported by the School Committee to the Board of Selectmen at the BoS meeting of March 17 and again to the Warrant Committee at its meeting of March 19. An overview of the resulting budget, specifically including the restoration of level funding in the textbook item, was presented at the School Committee’s public hearing on the budget held March 25 and included in the distributed materials. All of these meetings were open to the public, including the press. You could even watch them on TV. Where was the Citizen-Herald on March 17, 19 and 25? Instead, the paper blames someone else–the School Committee, of course–for the lapse in their own reporting. (“In all of the paperwork gathered from meetings, requests, and materials online, nothing showed the textbooks funds being restored.”) The paper is losing credibility by the week as editorial opinion blatantly drives, and increasingly supplants, actual reporting of the news.

David Powelstock

Town Meeting Member, Precinct 4

Belmont property values down 6%?

I’m a big fan of the new breed of Web based real estate tracking sites like Zillow.com, Redfin.com and the like. They’re incredibly powerful tools for studying home values, researching towns and so on. The amount of information they consolidate — maps, demographics, public data on home sales and appraisals is amazing. That’s why I was intrigued when I got an email from Zillow noting that home values in Belmont have decreased 5.6% in the first quarter of 2008, compared with the same quarter in 2007. That’s hardly good news — but it could be worse. Single family home values nationally were down 7.5% in the same period. Condo values were down 9 percent, Zillow claims. There’s a link to their report (which isn’t just on Belmont) here.

Now Zillow.com trying to get people to visit their Web page is one thing, but the Zillow news jives with a recent conversation my wife had with one of the town’s assessors. He had come to our house to check out a bathroom renovation we’re doing. Despite the improvement, he said the assessed value of our house was likely going down in 2008, not up. It had dipped last year (unbeknownst to me) but he said the drop would be even bigger this year, given the state of the housing market.

On the one hand, this is good — I get to enjoy a renovated bathroom without worrying about the tax hit. On the other hand, it makes me worry that the town’s estimated $4.5m budget shortfall in FY 10 could end up being wishful thinking, especially if there are widespread reductions in property tax assessments — the town’s single biggest source of revenue.

Selectmen’s new e-mail policy doesn’t add up

First off, my sincere apologies for the delay in writing this week — work has taken me offline and out of town for much of the last week. The good news is that there is some cool new content in the pipeline, including a video tour of the Belmont PD that I hope to post in the coming days, for those of you who missed the BPD tour earlier in the year.

In the meantime, I wanted to weigh in on what I think is an important issue — and one that directly effects BloggingBelmont’s audience, namely: the Board of Selectmen’s new policy on responding to e-mail inquiries from voters. If you didn’t read it in the Citizen Herald, here’s the scoop: the Selectmen have decided that they will no longer respond directly to email correspondents and have cited the State’s open meeting laws as a reason. The open meeting laws are a complex beast, and I don’t want to bore you with it here, so I’ve broken out a discussion about them and you can read it here.

The long and short of this issue is that Belmont’s Selectman are using a very expansive interpretation of the open meeting laws to bolster their decision to stop e-mail communications. According to Selectmen Firenze, e-mail exchanges with constituents in town may inadvertently violate the law because they can be circulated freely. If communications contain information about a Selectman’s position on an issue before the board, and if they fall under the gaze of a fellow Selectman, they could constitute an illegal quorum of the Board in which deliberations on the public matter were taking place outside of the public’s eye. They believe this is true, even if the e-mail was read inadvertently, or posted in a public forum, as with the e-mail message from Dan LeClerc that I posted to B2 back in February.

According the BCH article, “Because there are only three members of the board, two of them make a quorum, and it is illegal for a quorum of a governmental body to discuss matters of policy outside of a meeting open to the public. Once a selectman responds to an e-mail from a constituent, the content of that e-mail is out of their hands, and has the potential to reach another board member.”

What’s the solution? In short, e-mail communication between voters and Selectmen is now going to be a one-way street. Under the new policy “Instead of responding individually to constituents, the board will forward all the e-mails they receive about matters of town policy to the Board of Selectmen’s Office, where an automated message will respond with an explanation of the board’s e-mail policy.”

After that, it gets complicated. “Town Administrator Tom Younger and Assistant Town Administrator Jeff Conti will draft the response message before the board votes it into policy. It will explain that the board does not respond to individual e-mails, but that the communication has been received. It will then be included in the packet circulated to each member before a meeting, and will be entered as part of the public record.”

These machinations would all be understandable if the mandate were coming as the result of a voter lawsuit, from the State or even from the Town’s legal counsel. But it isn’t. In fact, this new policy was cooked up by the Selectmen without direct input from the town’s legal advisers. It’s a confusing situation but let me sum it up this way, based on a phone conversation with Selectman Firenze shortly after the article was published:

1) There is some hazy language in the open meetings laws, which are certainly not clear on the status of e-mail conversations, given that e-mail didn’t exist outside of classified government labs when the laws were passed in the mid 1970s. Think of it this way: nobody — but nobody — is suggesting that one elected official inadvertently reading the thoughts of another elected official in an email thread or as its posted on a Web site constitutes an illegal quorum under the open meetings law — but it doesn’t NOT say that either. The Selectmen have not asked for the legal opinion of the Town’s counsel on this because, in short, that would cost the town money.
2) The Selectmen have been using personal computers to conduct official business for the town, including sending and receiving e-mail from their personal e-mail accounts. This does seem to be an area of concern. Selectmen Firenze cites a Massachusetts Municipal Association position paper that personal computers should not be used for official business. We haven’t seen that position paper (we’re asking for it), but that sounds like a reasonable prohibition.

3) The town has offered to buy the Selectmen laptops to work and email on so they can stop using their personal computers, but Mr. Firenze and Mr. Soloman were not interested because that would cost the town money, and because they don’t relish having to drag them back and forth to Town Hall with them.

4) The current email setup, in which messages sent to the Selectmen’s e-mail address gets copied to all three Selectmen is sub optimal. First of all, it’s not working because there’s no way to coordinate who responds to those emails and what gets said, and second of all because the Selectmen get a lot of email and it takes time to respond to them. Finally, the current setup doesn’t work because email is easy to pass along and because its often hard to discern tone or intent from written email messages.

So that’s the reasoning. My take on this? I think that, in matters of public policy, Hippocrates ancient maxim “first, do no harm” should apply. And, in this case, I think that harm is being done. First of all, there’s a significant amount of discussion within Belmont that happens online, whether its in Yahoo groups or person to person. It’s 2008, so I don’t need to get analytic about how critical email communications are. It’s just a fact. Second, there’s a significant population of residents, especially those who work outside of town, who use e-mail and the Internet as a primary means of staying in touch with town affairs and getting their voice heard. To these people, the Selectmen are saying “you can talk, but we can’t discuss.” Other residents who choose to write letters, phone call or go to in person meetings get a different standard of service, and that’s not fair.

Finally, I just think its kind of nutty that three paid employees of the town are, in essence, saying that they want to be excepted from using a standard tool of modern organizations: the personal computer. I think it’s entirely reasonable for the town to purchase laptops for the Selectmen to use in the course of business, and to help them keep their private and public roles separate. The Selectmen need to meet the town half way and agree to use the laptops. The Rube Goldberg machine of an email response policy sounds complicated and Tom Younger and Jeff Conti have better things to do with their days than forwarding emails around and assembling printouts for the Selectmen’s meeting. Frankly, complaining about having to lug the devices to and fro, or the burden of keeping separate systems will ring hollow to the countless white collar professionals in town who do this every day and who wouldn’t dream of telling their employer “no thanks” when presented with a company standard laptop or desktop to do their job.

My 2c. You can register your displeasure (or your support) for the new policy by emailing them at: selectmen@town.belmont.ma.us.

The latest on School, Town Budget cuts…

I’m passing along up to date information on where things stand with deliberations on the proposed cuts to the School and Town operating budgets for next year. As you know, at the Warrant Committee meeting on Wednesday, both the town and School Department presented a list of cuts they would be forced to make, should the town be unable to patch over an estimated $1.4m structural deficit in its budget, and unwilling to pass an operational override to raise the extra funds. You can download Superintendent Holland’s proposal for cutting School Department programs to meet the Warrant Committee’s definition of a “level service” budget by clicking here.

School Committee member Ann Rittenburg posted a rundown of the School Department’s proposed cuts to BloggingBelmont on Wednesday. She’s posted a status update to the Action for Belmont’s Future mailing list (a wonderful resource — sign up for it by clicking here). At the risk of stealing even more of Ann’s words than I already have, I’m going to post it below for those of you who want to know exactly where things are as of late Thursday.

Remember: there is a joint Warrant Committee, School Department, Board of Selectmen meeting tomorrow (Saturday) morning starting at 9:00am in the Community Room of the Chenery Middle School. We’re looking for all able bodied residents who are concerned about maintaining excellence in the schools to come to that meeting and show your support. This will be your last real opportunity to stand up before the town’s elected leaders and make your concerns about teacher cuts, the elimination of music education in the elementary schools and sharp reductions in extracurriculars heard.

We are also urging everyone to take five minutes to write an e-mail to the Selectmen at selectmen@town.belmont.ma.us voicing your concern over proposed cuts to the Belmont Public Schools and your support for Superintendent Holland’s proposed budget and for putting a vote for an operational override, if necessary, before the town. Remember: the Selectmen are the gatekeepers who determine whether or not an override vote can be put before the voters. Without their backing, the town can’t vote to increase revenues to cover our structural budget deficit.

++++++++++++++++

Update from Ann Rittenburg posted on Action for Belmont’s Future:

Here is a summary of the major developments that came out of last evening’s Warrant Committee meeting:

1.) An additional $265,145 has been added to the School Department’s bottom-line figure, but has not yet been allocated. [This means we can add back $265,145 worth of items (to be determined) from the list of reductions presented in Exhibit A from Tuesday night's School Committee meeting, which then became Exhibit A Revised as of Wednesday.]

2.) The primary reason additional funds have been added to the School Department’s bottom-line is that the Assessors agreed to release all of the funds held in their FY05, FY06, and FY07 Overlay Reserve Accounts back into the Town of Belmont’s Revenue stream. The net effect of this is $423K worth of additional revenue for FY09 to be split between the the Town and School sides of the ledger. [Note: this is a one-time-only source of revenue: we will only have it for FY09. It will not reoccur in FY10, etc. It does nothing to reduce our structural gap, it only helps us paper over part of the gap for FY09.] (See detail below.)

3.) There is some speculation that the amount we currently have budgeted for health insurance could be reduced, thus freeing up money currently allocated to health insurance costs for allocation elsewhere in the budget. No decisions about revising our current estimates will be made until we have some additional information a few weeks from now, but we should be expecting to hear more about this as the budget process evolves. This appears to be the only potential place where any sort of significant adjustment to the budget could still happen (see detail below.)

3.) Consideration of an operating override as a means for balancing the FY09 budget has begun and will be continued on Saturday morning. The discussion that took place was a preliminary vetting of the idea and that was all. The idea is now on the table and it will be further vetted on Saturday morning.

DETAIL on items 2 and 3:
1.) Revenue Adjustment for the Town of Belmont: Net increase of $423,000.
Efforts to encourage the Assessors to release additional money held in their Overlay Reserve Accounts to the General Revenue stream were very successful. A variety of converging factors made it such that it was clear that they could comfortably release ALL of the money held in their FY05, FY06, and FY07 Overlay Accounts. Those accounts are now completely cleaned out, producing $598K of additional revenue, $175K of which went into their current (FY08) Overlay Reserve Account (part of their conditions for releasing the funds). The net effect of this was the addition of $423,000 worth of general funds, to then be split between the town side of the ledger and the school side of the ledger.

2.) Speculation about additional funds that may become available for reallocation, if we revise our estimates about health insurance costs for FY09:
We are currently budgeting our health insurance increase at 7% for FY09. A variety of factors seem to be pointing to the fact that we may be able to adjust this figure downward. We need to wait a few more weeks, so that we can get a bit more information and be in a better position to make a judgment about whether a revision may be in order — but there was a definite optimism that some of the funds currently allocated to the health insurance line could become available for allocation elsewhere in the budget.
For every 1% we decrease our current 7% estimate an additional $90K will become available for reallocation. There was specualtion that we could decrease our estimates by as much as 3% — but that was VERY speculative. For now, this speculative source of funds for reallocation is not being factored into the bottom-line.

School Committee weighing layoffs, other cuts

In brief: The Belmont School Committee met Tuesday evening to discuss proposed cuts of between $800,000 and $1.6 million to the FY 2009 budget. The Committee worked out various scenarios, but anticipated elimination of full time instructors at the Butler (2nd grade) and Wellington (3rd grade) elementary schools, as well as proposed new teaching positions at BHS and the Middle School. Class sizes are expected to increase to over 28 students/class in the incoming 5th grade, as well as 26 in the butler (3rd) and Burbank (2nd) schools. Proposals for a new Director of Guidance & Assessment at BHS and for all day kindergarten would also be shelved. You can view and print Superintendent Peter Holland’s proposals for possible reductions to the FY09 budget by clicking on the thumbnail images below.

Adjustments for Reductions in FY09 Budget pg. 1

Adjustments for Reductions in FY09 Budget pg. 2

Adjustments for Reductions in FY09 Budget pg. 3

What can I do? First: take five minutes and write an e-mail to the Belmont Board of Selectmen (selectmen@town.belmont.ma.us). Express your desire for an operational override to allow the Town to close the budget gap and maintain the excellence of its schools. Belmont hasn’t passed an override in more than six years and structural gaps in its budget will lead to annual crunches like this without an override.

There are two important meetings in the next week where parents can come to get informed about the proposed funding cuts to the Belmont public schools and also voice support for the schools to the town’s elected officials. The first is the Warrant Committee meeting this evening (Wed) in the community room at the Chenery Middle School at 7:30PM. The Warrant Committee is an appointed board that oversees the town’s finances and makes recommendations to the Board of Selectmen and Town Meeting.

The second important meeting is in the same location on Saturday morning, March 1, starting at 9:00am. At that meeting, the School Committee, Warrant Committee and Board of Selectmen will meet to discuss funding for the schools, as well as competing proposals, such as an operational override to fund road repair. Parents should absolutely come and voice their support of the schools before the Selectmen.

Details: I just got back from this evening’s School Committee meeting which was a somber affair. As B2 noted earlier, Belmont is looking at a number of options to offset an estimated $3m budget shortfall for FY09, including deep cuts to both the town and school budgets. That figure has tentatively been narrowed to around $1.4m by considering possible contributions from the Town’s free cash fund and assorted monies plucked from other line items in the town budget (as reported by the BCH). That narrows the cuts for the School Dept. to around $809,000 — a number that’s based on the size of the gap and the share of overall revenue that the schools get (estimated at around 56%).

The Warrant Committee has asked the School Department to come up with some figures to show what $800,000 in cuts will look like, before they decide whether the town needs an operational (Prop. 2 1/2) override to make up the difference, or whether a roads override is instead necessary — or neither. And that’s what tonight’s meeting was about: running the numbers on what cuts of various sizes might look like on the ground.

Needless to say, the various scenarios aren’t pretty, including the possibility of the loss of up to 8.5 full time instructor positions, district wide, and steep increases in levies for everything from sports (possibly $400 to $500 per kid) and transportation (up to $420/kid or $840/family for bus transportation).

The various options that Superintendent Holland details in his adjustments are confusing, but here’s what’s before the Warrant Committee and the Selectmen, should they opt not to vote to put an operating override before the town (or should the town reject that override):

• Eliminate at least five full time instructors, with likely cuts to staff at the Burbank (2nd or 4th grade), Butler (3rd grade), Wellington (2nd grade), Winn Brook (1st grade) and the High School. (savings $256,370)
  

Other casualties:

• The Music Elementary Instrumental Program (savings: $80,708)
• Non-salary accounts sharply (i.e no money for text books, technology, and buildings and grounds–savings $99,440)
• Reduce athletic program funding by 20% and increase levies on parents of students who wish to participate (savings:$29,160)
• Increase levies on student transportation to $420 per child, or $840 per family (savings: $16,000)
• Eliminate library aides in elementary schools (savings: $67,341)

And, as School Committee member Ann Rittenburg points out, these cuts assume that the WC will allocate some $800,000 in free cash to help fill the budget gap — a commitment they have not firmly made. Should they opt not to do an override and not to allocate free cash to fill the budget gap in the schools, the picture gets even darker.

Superintendent Holland’s handout details other options to reduce the School Dept. budget modestly, but that would still require the town to find a way to come up with a way to fund the mandatory cost increases, such as salary, SPED, utilities and so on.

Among those adjustments are moves to trim around $105,000 from the existing recommended FY09 budget. Savings come from attrition — teacher retirements that add up to 2.7 full time instructors who would not be replaced. Increases in electricity rates could be offset by money from the School Dept.’s revolving account. SPED increases are offset with money from the LABBB surplus. (Don’t ask me what the heck that is.)

Shelving a plan for town-funded all day kindergarten, and plans for an additional teaching positions at the High School and Middle School to keep class sizes in line takes another  $470,000 out of the proposed budget. No surprises here, and Superintendent Holland said that he plans on offering a FDK program that taps State grants to pay for most of the costs, with parent fees making up the difference. (More on this later.) In the end, Mr. Holland proposed an increase of 7.5% for FY 09, this option leaves us with an increase of 5.7%, or $2,098,037 over the FY08 budget, most of which is directed towards salary increases, fixed costs and mandated spending on SPED and other programs.

Warrant Committee to discuss school budget Wednesday

There’s an “all hands on deck” call to Belmont parents to show up to Wednesday evening’s Warrant Committee meeting, where the Superintendent’s Recommended Budget Request for FY09 will be presented to the Warrant Committee.  The Warrant Committee meeting begins at 7:30PM in the Community Room of the Chenery Middle School.
If you’re a parent of school age children, it’s time to come out and show support for the schools and the School Committee’s proposed budget, which includes funding to replace the aging Wellington School, among other priorities.

Whether you’re for proposals like rebuilding Wellington or funding full day kindergarten or against them, there’s plenty for everyone to agree on when it comes to the schools: the need for small class sizes, top flight instructors, necessary repairs to the high school, and on and on. Standing behind the School Committee as it presents its budget to the Warrant Committee is a great way to show those people who have their hands on the town’s purse strings that our schools matter.

See you Wednesday evening!

Firenze to School Committee: Full Day K will sink Wellington Override

This is the second installment of a multi-part post on my interview with Selectman Angelo Firenze. You can read the first part of the interview by clicking here.

In the first part of our conversation, Belmont Town Selectman Angelo Firenze and I spoke about his experience growing up in Belmont, how the town and its politics had changed since the 1940s and 50s, the job of being a selectman, and the current Board.

As our conversation continued, it became more topical, with Firenze weighing in on everything from funding for the schools, to the town’s business environment, to plans for a senior center and new library.

Our conversation picks up with Selectman Firenze continuing his discussion of Belmont’s level of per pupil spending (just FYI — Belmont ranked 205 out of 327 school districts the Commonwealth for per pupil spending, though Belmont is also at the bottom of the pile in receiving State aid for educational funding). Firenze’s position — which he articulates frequently — is that Belmont can do with less spending per pupil and lower standard schools because the community support for education is so strong. Firenze also talks about his concerns that continued tax overrides tied to school funding or other projects will drive older residents out of town.

Angelo Firenze: could we spend more money on education? Sure. Should we? If we had it, yes. But this is where the debate comes in. Look, I bought this house in 1977 and I paid $65,000 for it. I think I could get more for it if I sold it today. It’s assessed at $1.1 million. The house across the street recently sold for $1.45 million. Now that person who paid $1.45 million has a different expectation from the town than I do. Now I can afford to pay taxes on $1.1 million, fortunately. But not everyone can. So one of two things can happen, and that’s where the real rub comes in. You can chase all of the old people out of town who can’t afford to stay here. These are people who have lived here all their lives.

B2: But…come on. They’re being taxed based on the appreciation of an asset they purchased — their house. If they find that too much, can’t they downsize , but stay within town? Maybe purchase a condominium? If they didn’t want to move, couldn’t they get a reverse mortgage on their property and tap into the equity to help them pay their taxes and make ends meet?

AF: Why would you want them to have to do that? We’ve got to keep people in town. We’ve got to find a way to find right balance. That’s the very thing, diversity, that makes Belmont a great community. If we just raise spending, we’re going to force people out who can’t afford to live here. Let me ask you, what’s the right amount of property taxes that the town should be collecting?

B2: Well…I think the town should have all of its properties assessed at an appropriate level, and should collect taxes based on those assessed values.

AF: Let me ask you this: Is it in the town’s best interest for me to sell house or stay? If I move out, who’s going to move into this house? It’s got four bedrooms. A young family with kids will move in. If we continue on this path of letting people who are on the border line of being able to afford their house leave town because of the increased value of the house. If you allow that logical chain of events to happen, with constantly escalating real estate taxes and spending, then Belmont will look like Weston or Lincoln. You’ll end up in a situation where only people who can afford to live here move here.

B2: But isn’t the converse true, also? If you continue to short change education and services that young families want and need, won’t they leave town? Won’t they move to Lexington, or Weston or Concord?

AF: Let them. Let people who are in a position to pay more taxes pay more taxes.

B2: Full day kindergarten has been a hot topic on Bloggingbelmont and in the town recently. My understanding is that the School Committee is going to put funding for full day kindergarten in their FY 08 budget. What’s your position on that?

AF: I don’t think the School Committee will put it in the budget for this year.

B2: Oh really? My sense from last week’s School Committee meeting was that they would.

AF: Let me put it this way. It’s in the interest of the School Committee to not put it in the budget for this year. What’s in the budget for this year is an override for the Wellington School. I support a debt exclusion for the Wellington School, but oppose an operational override and funding for the roads and a debt exclusion for the Wellington. Last time around, I got around 150 emails from parents of kids who were gong into kindergarten supporting full day kindergarten. But I also got a number of emails from parents of children in high school saying ‘if we add the $350,000 for full day kindergarten, what will that do to my child’s programs? They don’t give a (expletive) about kids in kindergarten.

B2: Don’t you find it a sad statement. That we’ve got a community that’s so deeply divided, that parents of high school children could only think about a program for kindergartners in terms of what it would take away from their child’s education?

AF: It is sad. We are all one community, but we’ve got to recognize that we can’t do everything that we might want to do for every person. We’ve got to find the right balance. And I think the right balance is where we’re at. I don’t think there’s anything out of balance at this point. I don’t think we’re spending too much money on anything..except maybe buildings.

B2: What do you think your role as a Selectman is in all this?

AF: What I can do as a Selectman in Belmont is to try to make Belmont the best community it can be, given all the benefits the town has to offer. I want to make sure that the town is in balance. That the poor and the rich people have a reason to stay. That the people who care about education have a reason to stay, and make this the best possible overall community that we can have. I can try to make sure that nobody is being neglected by someone else, number one. Number two: when residents look at the way the town operates. The elected officials, department heads. The whole thing. I want the people of Belmont to say hard working people run this town and be confident that they’re making the best decisions for this town.

Up next…”I’m a reasonable guy. How can I support the building of a senior center across the street when I know we need a new Library?”