First of all: check out the new Bloggingbelmont.com header graphic. I got tired of the standard Google maps graphic, so I used my handy Powershot to take this panorama pic from the Belmont Center train platform a week or so ago. Hope you like it. If you hate it or its messing up your ability to view the Bloggingbelmont site, let me know and…well…I’ll change it. This site’s about the words, not the graphics, after all!
Now on to business: with the spring town meeting now officially over after three sessions, the town’s attention now turns to the upcoming special election on June 9, when town residents will be asked to consider an override of Proposition 2 1/2. The goal is to raise $2.5m to fund road repairs. Of course, the June 9 vote is just the first in three expected override votes. Others include a debt exclusion vote to fund reconstruction of the Wellington School. The timing of that is unclear, and depends on the state giving the green light to state funds, but could come as early as this summer. There is also an expected operational override vote that will need to accompany the FY10 budget, barring any radical and unplanned improvements in the town’s finances.
With three big votes staring voters in the face, BloggingBelmont is introducing the first-ever reader survey. We’re using a free survey from our friends at surveymonkey.com. This is highly unscientific (can you say “self selecting population”) — but no more so than the polls offered by our esteemed local paper.
A couple notes:
1) The survey appears as a pop-up window when you click the link below. If you don’t see the pop-up window when you click, make sure you have set your Web browser to allow pop-ups (at least for the voices.bloggingbelmont.com Web page), then try again!
2) I’ve had inconsistent results getting the survey to appear at all, depending on the Web browser I’m using. (Did I mention surveymonkey.com is free?) In any case, let me know if you encounter problems viewing the survey and I’ll try to help.
CLICK HERE TO TAKE THE BLOGGINGBELMONT.COM ROADS OVERRIDE SURVEY — AND THANK YOU FOR PARTICIPATING!
Paul — is it just me or is the link to the survey not functioning?
Hey Steve. Try it now! Thanks for your patience.
Once I got the survey to popup, I found that question 6 is broken. There are 3 sub-questions there but the survey only allows you to check each kind of answer once. In other words, you can only answer “agree” for one of the questions at a time. If you click on “agree” for a second question, it clears the checkmark on “agree” for the previous question. So the 3 questions have to be answered differently for the survey to accept them.
I will not be voting for the override for the roads. We did that already and the money is not being used for roads. If the town can afford to give out hugh raises to the school administration then they can find the money for the roads
Weird, Gail. I’m not seeing that behavior on Question 6. You should be able to rate your response for each line item. Do you want to try again and tell me what happens? – Paul
I see the same behavior on Question #6 as Gail sees. Everything else works ok for me.
At first I thought maybe it was happening because I use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer. But I tried it in IE also and see the same behavior. I’m running Windows Vista. When I get a chance I’ll try it on some other computer that isn’t running Vista and let you know what happens.
Hi Paul,
I just had the same problem with question 6. It did not allow me to answer “agree” to more than one question.
Lynne
I will not vote for any override until the town stops wasting money. The new fire stations are a joke. The floor in the one on Trapelo Road needs to be replace and the roof leaks. The town is stuck with the repair bills, not the contractor, because of the way we do things in this town.
Dick: thanks for your thoughts. I hadn’t heard anything about problems with the (brand new) Trapelo Rd. station. Where had you heard about the roof leaks and floor problems (as well as about Belmont footing the bill)? Did the BCH write about it?
Could folks who are having Question #6 problems email me (paul(at)bloggingbelmont.com) and indicate which operating system they’re running? There’s some thoughts that this might be Windows-Vista related. Thanks!
I am running Windows XP Pro and having the issues with #6. My browser is IE 7.
BTW, I am for the override. To me it’s a simple question, you are either happy with the roads in town or you are not. If you are happy, then voting down the override makes sense. If you are not, and feel the roads must be fixed, then the override is the only option. In THEORY of course, there are better options, cutting spending from other places, better budgeting, etc. But that is pure theory, we all know well enough that this will never happen, regardless of what “messages” we try to send. It is NOT unique to Belmont, every town has the same struggle. You end up cutting off your nose to spite your face and in the end our roads will never get fixed. To me, the disrepair of our roads is important enough that I’m not willing to take the chance. I’m voting YES.
Mac OSx 10.5.2 with Firefox 2.0.0.14
I struggle w/ the roads question — not in terms of whether the town needs the money — clearly all three votes need to pass — but in terms of how it will affect other votes/priorities. I’d rather my kids walk to school in a town with no roads than have their school building continue to collapse around them, as the Wellington is doing.
Love the new masthead Paul! Looks great.
To Patty, who wrote: “I will not be voting for the override for the roads. We did that already and the money is not being used for roads.”
This is factually incorrect, assuming town officials are telling us the truth: The money approved in 2001 for roads, $1 million, has been used for roads every since.
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?
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.
Paul — I’ve had the same problem with number 6. Using IE, Windows XP.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[...] Blogging Belmont News and Views from Belmont, Massachusetts « Survey: Your feelings on the roads override (and those other overrides, too) [...]
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.
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.
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.
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.