Survey: Your feelings on the roads override (and those other overrides, too)

I used to count sheep while falling asleep. Now I count overides, until I wake up in a cold sweat looking for a "For Sale" sign. My top ten reasons why I never want to hear the word override in this town again unless I'm telling someone where to stick one:

1) The $1,000,000 buydown of the Maclean project for open space. Does anyone really walk the grounds of a psychiatric hospital to enjoy the open space?

2) The R&D building at Macleans that still isn't built and therefore no tax revenue.

3) The $25,000 dog and pony show a few years ago that the selectmen put on while hiring the acting police chief for the permanent position.

4)The outlandish finishes at town hall. That must have been one big quarry to find that much granite!

5) The overpriced purchase of the 2 family property on Concord Ave that went from income producing real estate for the former owner to a party house for trespassers overnight. Then we tear it down for another $$. And people are crying about not enough affordable housing.

6) The O'Neill property debacle.

7) The Murry Sandler site debacle.

8) The dabacle concerning the route 2 median land for the proposed soccer field to be built and maintained by the Belmont Hill School at no cost to the taxpayer.

9) The school choice fiasco. What did that really cost ?

10) The ammunition the School Comittee has given the Teachers Union for their next contract. Call it a promotion instead of a raise if that makes you feel better. The genie is out of the bottle and look out below!

11) #BONUS# Building a fire station from blue prints of a fire station in the South Bronx is a little over the top!

I could go on forever but I need to get some sleep. I'm working my second job on Sundays. When your property taxes go up 300% in ten years that's what I have to do.

On past override money "not being used for roads". Completely false. This year we're spending about $1.1M on roads (from Belmont's budget) plus about $400k from the state "Chapter 90" funds that cities and towns get for road work. This was very clear at Town Meeting, during the budget presentations. Having been on the Capital Budget Committee for 2 years, I know they are absolutely dedicated to living up to promises made to the voters in 2001. Town officials are indeed telling the truth.

Hey. Excellent points -- There is no "MCAS" equivalent on the town side of things that mandates particular spending or programs. You're also right that new technology will likely shine a light on some of the shadowy recesses in town budget -- that's all for the good. I think that I was commenting on the rather visceral reaction that folks have to stories about school administrator salaries, full day K or whatever the budget item may be.

Paul,

There's several things going on the affect how much scrutiny the different budgets get. The schools are:

1) a single huge budget item. It does tend to focus your attention.

2) measured, using standards established more or less by law, to a fare-the-well. Both MCAS and accounting are supposed to be measured in the same way all over the state, so we can compare apples to apples. It is my understanding that in addition to that, in recent years we had people from the state (from the no-good-deed-goes-unpunished department) study how we run our school system, so there's that additional check on our measures.

3) apparently run rather independently, once they get their budget. People may be upset at Pat Aubin's promotion (and hence, salary increase), but the school department's got not much to do with the roads. And, further, there's a sound argument, based on those same standardized metrics, that we should be willing to pay a small bit of money (what, .1% of the school budget?) for continuity in the school administration, so it's a double mistake to use that spending as a reason not to support a roads override. It's probably a good idea to keep Aubin and Missal around long enough to get a new superintendent oriented; anyone complaining about the money, should look at the per-pupil spending in all our neighboring and similar towns. We could do far, far worse.

And it's worth emphasizing, that in any large organization, there are mistakes and inefficiencies. We have the metrics, MCAS and budget, to prove that in general we make fewer mistakes and waste less money than the vast majority of school systems in Massachusetts. That aggregate data beats any shocking anecdote or startling salary.

We've got few similar measurements on the town side, because it's several smaller departments, and because there's no town-services version of "Ed Reform" at the state level mandating standardized accounting. I think that the accounting for spending will get more standardized in the future because many of the towns are using or moving to the same software -- I recall this item from town meeting a year or three ago, it was a decently large budget item -- but this is a new development. I hear, via my wife (who has actually studied how companies adopt or change their IT) that this is not a matter of waving a wand and walking away; it takes time and money and care.

There are some town things that we've measured. Despite the leaking roofs, we did study the location of the fire stations, and we believe that they can reach most residents quickly. We've had consultants measure the roads, and they report that our roads are in bad shape and getting more expensive to repair as we fall behind.

I think the problem may be that you have Question 6 set up wrong in SurveyMonkey. I've used it for work and you will get this kind of behavior if you choose the wrong question type.

Hey -- a shout out to those who have responded to the Roads Override survey. I've been contacted by a reporter for the Globe Northwest who is looking to speak with residents who are opposed to the override. If you're interested, email me at paul (at) bloggingbelmont.com and I can pass along your contact info to the reporter for her story.

Paul, I heard about the main floor and roof problems from Belmont firemen. Also, when the center station was constructed a transformer box on the ground was moved at a cost of approximately $100,000 for purely cosmetic reasons. That from a knowledgeable Light Dept source. This is why I say the town doesn't spend money wisely.

Paul -- I've had the same problem with number 6. Using IE, Windows XP.

Two things: on the Question 6 -- seems like some folks are having problems responding to more than one of the rating items there, and some aren't. I could spend an hour or so tweaking surveymonkey or baking up a different survey form to try to get rid of the problem, or I could just ignore it and heavily bracket any conclusions from the responses to question 6, given that many of your couldn't respond fully. I'm going to do the latter.

Re: the roads issue. I tend to agree with Tony, at least insofar as nobody's shown me proof that the last override went to do anything other than road maintenance. Absent pictures of the highway dept.'s holiday getaway to Bimini, we've got to assume that the override money went right where it was intended. The coincidence of that override vote and huge cuts in local aid that accompanied the beginning of the Romney administration didn't help. in the end, half of the money raised inthe override just went to maintaining level services, as I understand it. Comfort yourself with the thought of how bad our roads would be, given those cuts, had we not done an override.

Let me say this, however, in my experience, this town (in the form of the Warrant Committee, Selectmen and others) does a very good job scrutinizing school spending. The hoopla about the recent salary increase that accompanied Pat Aubin's temporary promotion aside, anyone who has had to sit in on one of the budget meetings and listen to Mrs. Allison and others second guess and comb over every last line item would have a hard time saying that nobody in town pays attention to or questions how the schools are spending their money. In fact, the opposite is true. That's as it should be -- the schools being this town's largest recipient of taxpayer dollars. But frankly, I don't hear or see nearly as much scrutiny of expenditures on the Town side of thing. Truth be told, the highway dept. is something of a black box and we tend to take it on faith that the staffing levels, equipment expenditures, materials costs, contracting costs and so on are as they should be. One reason, I think, is that all of us have spent a lot of time in a school (as students -- if not running one or teaching). That gives us what we think is an intuitive understanding of how they should be run, what's worth investing in and what isn't. Few of us, on the other hand, are road maintenance experts, so scrutinizing the highway dept.'s operations is kind of like when your mechanic opens the hood of your car to show you what's wrong. You don't argue with that guy -- "Do you really think a new alternator is necessary, sir?" -- you just nod and say "uh huh" and ask "how much will this cost?" In the end, I'll likely vote for this override, and the Wellington and the operational override -- for the simple reason that I don't want to see the town's infrastructure and services degraded more than they already have been. But that doesn't mean the town shouldn't ask hard questions of the highway dept. about which roads need the most urgent attention, whether it makes sense to engineer every road in town to support cars traveling at a high rate of speed, and whether there are economies to be found in equipment, staffing (do we really need six guys standing around while that one guy works the backhoe?), materials, contracting other areas.

Tony makes an excellent point and, if we are to believe what we are told, the money from the override can not be used for anything besides roads. Do I understand this correctly?