Wilton’s Board of Finance chair was on the hot seat Tuesday night, Feb. 13, when he clashed with fellow financiers over how to word the upcoming survey on taxes and the town’s budget.
Earlier in the evening, following preliminary news about the revaluation, juxtaposed with current budget proposals being considered by the Boards of Education and Selectmen, BOF members realized that many Wilton residents could face tax increases of 10% and even upwards of 15% in some cases.
Chair Matthew Raimondi, an equity investor who says he brings to the BOF a considerable experience drafting and executing data surveys, appeared to feel some frustration with his board after members began to suggest changes to the draft they were scheduled to vote on Tuesday night.
At issue was how to word the survey in a way that would make it clear to residents exactly what the tradeoffs were in relation to budget and tax increases. While Raimondi’s survey draft directly asked questions about the public’s tolerance for various mill rate increases, financiers felt that layperson residents might not completely understand what the questions meant in terms of their tax dollars.
“I’m not sure that the survey can ask questions about the mill rate? … People are going to need to get educated,” Vice Chair Stewart Koenigsberg said.
He and others suggested that questions should directly focus on tax rate increases, with ranges for people to show exactly what they might be willing to coin up.
“People are voting on the mill rate,” Raimondi countered. “That’s what they’re voting on.”
Having volunteered to draft and finalize the wording of the survey, Raimondi said that if changes were made regarding that wording, he would step away from the project entirely.
“I won’t do it,” he said.
“Cutting that data, I don’t even know how to make sense of it,” he said, noting briefly that the material collected would be virtually impossible to synthesize.
“I’m not gonna do that and if someone else wants to take over the survey, they can certainly do that,” Raimondi said.
“We don’t even need to do the survey,” he said, calling any resulting data collected “uninterpretable.”
“I don’t know even know how I would interpret this survey … It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just that I’m not sure we can,” he said.
Board members sought to assuage Raimondi’s concerns, praising him for his work and voicing their belief in the importance of the survey.
At the same time, the other five members were unanimously firm that as it was currently drafted, the survey could cause more confusion than provide clear answers about what residents really want to do.
“I’m hearing the majority say that we (should) talk in dollars … It just makes the survey very confusing,” BOF member Sandy Arkell said, noting that this budget year — with the variety of issues facing the town — is a very complicated one, even for BOF members.
“We’re confused and we’re the experts,” she said.
BOF member Rudy Escalante agreed.
“The problem that we have is that … given what’s happened with the revals, those numbers are kaplooey … These are really unprecedented numbers,” he said.
“I think this is a very different year,” he said. “Because of these [property revaluations] and the normal mill rate to my taxes, that whole equation falls apart … even for me.”
“We’re supposed to be the experts and I have trouble,” Escalante said.
Suppressing some frustration, Raimondi pointed out that the intention had been to send the survey out by the end of February, and their next regularly scheduled meeting isn’t until March 14.
“You guys have had it since Jan. 9 … I’m happy to be the quarterback on this thing, but it sounds like people have some pretty strong views on this thing, which is new information tonight,” he said.
While some suggested approving it tonight and leaving it in the chair’s hands to make modifications, Raimondi said the survey needed to be approved in whole by the BOF.
Toward that end, he scheduled a special BOF meeting for Friday, Feb. 23, at 5 p.m.
“I think it’s a valuable tool,” BOF member Timothy Birch said of the survey, “and while there may be differences of opinion on how confusing or not confusing it may be for the average taxpayer, I would hesitate on not doing a survey, especially in a year like this year.”
Raimondi cautioned that the survey shouldn’t be too long, as last year about 100 people started taking the BOF survey and then didn’t finish.
“There are tradeoffs when you make it too long,” he said.
Raimondi sent out a draft of the survey with his newsletter last month and received comments from six people about the content and formatting, including a suggestion to conduct the survey by telephone, segmenting the respondents by whether they have children in schools, and adding questions about supporting specific budget items.
“The idea of the survey was truly to give people the opportunity to reach out to us,” Raimondi said, noting it was part of a campaign promise to improve communication.
“This thing has snowballed and kind of taken on a life of its own,” he said.
We continue to support any way the town can receive input from the wide variety of age groups who are fortunate to live here. We have always filled out any surveys offered and will continue to do so. We very much support the sometimes thankless efforts of preparing a thoughtful survey like the one that the Chair has done. It seems an opportunity for information from those who are reluctant to speak at crowded public hearings. It is especially challenging when one has a different take on a bottom line. You should all want to hear from as many as possible. Public response and reactions are always welcome. It is one of the few additional primary sources one can add to the evidence of the major challenges we the taxpayers and our leadership have this year. The more information the better, friends, will add to a more judicious and complicated endpoint.
I’m very happy to see this unanimous pushback against Raimondi’s mill rate question. I would happily volunteer to run a survey for the BOF myself – as a computer person who also has a reputation as a survey skeptic – but it seems unlikely they’d take me up on that. (maybe if a couple of us anti-survey people got together we could make a compelling pitch)
If the BOF can’t come together on a survey, one alternative I would suggest would be that the BOF majority agree on what they consider appropriate reductions to the BOE and BOS budgets, but then approve + send the original BOE/BOS budget proposals off to the Annual Town Meeting, with Raimondi as BOF chair having an opportunity to make a pitch for their lower numbers in his speech, and with DeLuca and Boucher each having the opportunity to defend their original budgets in theirs. Since the town meeting can only reduce budget items and not increase them, the budget the BOF submitted to the town meeting would have to use the higher numbers, but the BOF (or, if they’re not allowed to, their proxies) could make and second a motion to cut each budget to their actual proposed level, and the town would then have the opportunity to debate and vote on it. Of course we might also settle on some number in the middle.
In this extraordinarily difficult budget year, there’s a lot to recommend the idea of putting this question to a legally binding town meeting vote rather than a confusing online survey – a decision this consequential ought to have as much democratic legitimacy as it possibly can.
Given that we have all received a letter showing (indirectly) our new property valuations, it seems to me that it should not be difficult to send out letters showing what our specific tax bill would be for a range of possible mill rates. That range of mill rates can correspond to a range of possible budget outcomes. From that point on, discussions can be phrased in terms of mill rate outcomes and should be understandable to everybody.