Conservative in a Blue State: Spend and tax school districts

Sometimes it seems as though I feel like I'm a conservative trapped inside a blue state.  Like a brightly colored straight jacket, it seems to constrict me.  People wonder, for example why I was involved in the tea parties and wonder why I might be so offended by the current administration in the White House.  I live in New York, I'm offended by my state, I'm offended by my county, I'm offended by my town, I'm even offended by my local school district.  People raise children where I live who cannot afford to live here after college.  My town looks like a war zone (this may be due, in part, to a poor leadership in the highway department that results in most pot holes looking like scar tissue and drains so poorly maintained that they start collapsing around them).  So, in order to explain why my positions, I think I need to start at the bottom and work my way up.  This means starting with the school district, which is a very good place to start as it is "budget time."  Soon we will get to "vote" on our budget, an experience that makes me understand what it is like to live in a place where one vote is literally meaningless.

So, with that in mind let's look at the local school district of my area.  The "Shoreham-Wading River Central School District" (another bone of contention since when I was in the 6^th grade when this district formed they had a naming contest and there were a lot better names than just combining the two area names in a hyphen) spans the towns of Riverhead and Brookhaven on beautiful Long Island in the Blue State of New York.  If you want to do the due diligence you can get all the documents for the budget proposal here.

Let's look first at expenses.  Remember, it's all about expenses.  Last year's 2008-2009 revised budget for total expenses was $54,103,741.  Times are tough, the economy is down, and the need to tighten the belt is important.  The 2009-2010 tentative budget is $56,139,167.  That's an increase of $2,035,426 or a 3.76% increase!  Going by the codes there is a 0.4% increase in "general support," a 5% increase in "regular day school," a 2.2% increase in "community service" and a 5.2% increase in "undistributed expenses."  On the other hand there is a 4.8% decrease in "transportation" (but since kids have to get to school and activities one way or the other, this is just a cruel way of transferring costs from the school to the parents when fuel prices are again on the rise).

At this point it is good to remember that I live in a democratic nation and that this budget must be put to a vote.  If the vote fails then the contingency budget will be used instead.  What joy, what rapture, this notion of democracy.  So let's look at the 2009-2010 contingency budget.  The total expense is $55,909,385.  That's a savings of $229,782 or a whole 0.41% (making the budget only a 3.34% increase instead of a 3.76% increase).

But wait there is more!  Both local revenue and state aid will be decreased ($30,340 local decrease and $349,841 state decrease).  Add them all up and you are talking about a $2,193,824 increase to the burden of home owners already stressed out by the economic situations all around them!

Now if you look at the "Budget Perspectives" you will see their feeble attempt to justify all of this.  Let me give you the conservative executive summary.  They start in 1988 when they claim the manure hit the fan, but I will start before that time.  Once upon a time there was an era of untold prosperity, not among the people, but because of the construction of a nuclear power plant.  Funding flowed like water and everyone was very happy.  No expense was too great; although we did manage to defeat a swimming pool for the High School.  Then in 1988 the music died, the powerful liberal environmentalists finally managed to close forever the nuclear power plant and with it the eternal flow of property revenue to the school district.  "Significant staff & program cuts were made over this 10-year period. This represents an era of 'lost competitiveness.'"

Oh my, now that's a laugh.  Where do I begin?  Should I go all the way back to the era of my childhood in the mid 70's when the district was first formed and when they built that disaster of a building for a middle school using an "open design" that is a problem to this very day?  No, our school district never had competitiveness, that's why I went to Catholic elementary and eventually high school instead of going to that dump of a middle school designed by idiots who had no real clue how real education is done!

The problem with socialism is that soon you run out of other people's money.  You can't spend your way to better competitiveness when the people around you can't even afford to live here with the current tax rates, when foreclosures makes it even harder for those who remain!

"The budget was defeated five times in the ten years after the LILCO plant was closed. This voter activism seems to have created negative momentum that persists to this day."  Cry me a river.  There is no thought about why those budgets were defeated, no understanding of how they mishandled their case to the residents of the district, how they literally held at one point the sports program at budgetary gun point (they pulled the trigger and sports would have died; fortunately the students managed to raise the necessary funds to keep sports going; the kids knew how to raise the money, not the adults). "Today, fewer than 1 in 4 parents typically vote in a school election (22% in 2008)."  It's not our fault really; it should be the parents who force the other land owners to pay for our wonderful spending programs.  The young families must rise and squeeze the last penny from the retired senior citizen home owners who are seeing additional hardships by the removal of the state STAR property tax program!

So I am going to vote down the school budget!  Why?  Because if my only choice is between a massive increase or a massive increase I'll take the lesser of two evils and in the process exercise my democratic right to say "NO."  The people around me are taxed enough already!