To the editor:

I respond to the letter that called for the School Committee and Town Council line item budget requests to automatically appear on the Financial Town Referendum (FTR) ballot in addition to the Budget Committee Recommendation, as well as any elector petitions. Although on the surface this may seem perfectly reasonable, I would like to point out some downsides to doing this.

First, as was the case in most of the old financial town meetings and recent FTR’s, the School Committee and Town Council are usually in agreement with the Budget Committee. So, in that case, the ballot would have redundant entries. This is why the FTR “Optional Budget Proposal” available to the School Committee and Town Council is in fact “optional”.

Second, if the Charter were mechanized to automatically place line item School Committee and Town Council budgets on the FTR ballot (even when those amounts were “similar” to the Budget Committee recommendation), then the inclusion of an Elector Petition would lead to ‘vote splitting,’ which increases the likelihood that none of the three proposals (Budget Committee, School Committee/Town Council, Elector Petition) receives a majority of the votes cast.

Third and most important, automatically placing a School Committee and Town Council request on the ballot is a disincentive to arrive at a well thought out, “consensus” budget. Rather, there is a real possibility that each year the School Committee and Town Council would simply request near the maximum 4%, and why not since it is going on the ballot anyway? Whereas, the FTR “optional” proposal incentivizes the parties to sharpen the pencil toward a “consensus” budget that hopefully will not lead to vote splitting or an Elector Petition.

The FTR is well thought out in that its tenets encourage various government bodies to work toward a common goal which is hopefully acceptable to the taxpayer. With this construct as an example, any changes to the FTR need to be well thought out by the impending Charter Review Commission. Toward this end, I encourage you to support the Candidate slate endorsed by the Tiverton Taxpayers Association. Many of the slate’s members have significant working experience with both the FTR and Charter in general, and the entire slate believes the FTR should remain substantially unchanged as Tiverton’s process for budget adoption and tax levy approval.

Ray Fougere

The author is a candidate for the Tiverton Charter Review Commission.