After my last swim of the Summer I ran into one of the first friends I made when I moved into town in the late ‘80s. Besides being veterans we have little else in common; yet, we enjoy shooting the breeze and when we bump into each other our chats usually carry on for a good chuck of time. He’s quite fond of the beach and as we hiked its shore he spoke insightfully of Mother Nature’s ever ongoing assault on South Shore Beach — “it’s a fugitive beach.”

From veterans’ issues we rambled on and into politics. In agreement that Mr. Trump is a pernicious mixture of pride and folly, we downshifted to the mundane of local politics and discussed a few of the new candidates running for school committee and town council. My friend never fails to mention that he’s an independent, but like most independents in Little Compton he leans Republican. Although I’ve never heard him state it outright, he likes and wants his taxes kept low, beyond that he doesn’t want to be bothered. And so he was committed to voting for at least three Republicans, if not the three incumbent republicans running for town council.

Here I interposed into our little, but important, debate the long-standing myth that only a Republican majority on the town council can and will keep taxes low in Little Compton. I countered his belief in this enduring and influential tenet — here he bridled when I first mentioned dogma — by stating the two main reasons, the two pillars, that will always support a low tax rate in LC: RI General Law (44-5-2) caps the increase in tax levy each year at 4 percent over the levy from the previous year; and the fact that we have no high school. For sure there are other ingredients that go into the low-tax-rate-cake that is baked each year at the Financial Town Meeting; nevertheless, these two main and long-standing ingredients favor no political party and therefore any party, any majority, can and will keep taxes low.

Dennis August Almeida

Little Compton