| Important Update from Bill Generous -- Last Year's Budget Referendums |
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| Written by Administrator | |
| Saturday, 05 January 2008 08:00 | |
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Attached is an update to a spreadsheet I previously sent you concerning tax changes for each CT town. The main update is that the town of Union is now included as a referendum town. In total, I had 80 referendum towns for FY 2007-08 with 73 of them having their final budget adopted via a referendum. East Hartford and North Branford weren't classified as referendum towns since minimum participation requirements were not met when property owners voted. Collectively, referendum towns and non-referendum towns had similar spending increases as well as tax rate changes. Also attached is an Excel spreadsheet, taxcap.xls, that "approximately" compares tax changes for referendum towns to Governor Rell's 3% tax cap proposal. For Fiscal Year 2006-07, referendum towns in the aggregate exceeded the Governor's proposed tax cap by 1.90%. Referendum towns only exceeded the cap by 0.25% for Fiscal Year 2007-08 since towns in general had lower tax increases this year as a result of the large increase in funding from the state. It seems to me that since many citizens vote to exceed the tax cap when given the opportunity in a referendum, provisions that limit a town from using a referendum to get to an overide are needed to truly cap tax changes. Governor Rell had a provision last year that at least two-thirds of the town's legislative body had to vote to overide the limit before a referendum overide could be attempted. That would help in Windsor where at most 5 of 9 Town Councilors can be from one pol itical party. A provision that required a minimum number of citizen overide votes (ex. 15% of registered voters must vote "yes" to an overide of the tax cap) would also greatly reduce the number of towns that exceed the tax cap. Towns that have not experienced referendums would benefit more than referendum towns in the short term because those towns have a pent up demand to lower the tax increases and now a release valve to take out their tax frustrations if an overide were attempted via a referendum. I have found that referendum towns and non-referendum towns do not experience major differences collectively in their tax increases. In other words, in the longer term, I would expect many towns that currently do not have referendums, to also exceed the tax cap in an overide referendum, just like many referendum towns did over the last two fiscal years when their actual tax changes are compared to a theoretical tax cap. What do you think of the Governor's tax cap proposal? Bill Generous |
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| Last Updated ( Monday, 07 January 2008 04:14 ) |
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