Better Choice 2011 Board of Finance candidate David Adametz responds to Selectwoman Cathy Iino's town address on the property tax increase

We wish to thank Selectwoman Cathy Iino for her straightforward discussion of why our taxes are being raised.  We appreciate the courage, professionalism, and dignity Ms. Iino displayed in addressing an unpopular political decision with the people of Killingworth, as an elected leader should have, and we no objections to anything she told us in her address.  What we do object to, is what she hasn’t told us in her address.  

She hasn't told us any solution to the educational expenditures comprising 80% of the town's entire budget, despite her admission that the school budget is the primary reason for our increased taxes.  Rather than pursuing the current policy of casually blaming all our fiscal problems on the school system, we need to instead work with our schools as a resource partner to look for ways to address the problems we face.  Case in point; our youth of today are among the most technologically and creatively gifted people in the world, and combined with the school's own technology resources, it is this energy that should have been enlisted to develop our town's much needed website.  If asked to come to the town's assistance, I know our youth and our school system would have answered the call, and this would have saved the town thousands of dollars and given our youth civic pride as well as much needed real world work experience.  Yet instead, the Iino administration chose to contract a private web design company to develop our town website, publicly insisting on spending the many thousands of dollars of town money on its development and even renouncing any consideration to the contrary, leaving our students still starving for work experience.  We will never know what opportunity we allowed our future generations to miss.

She also hasn’t told us that the budget includes continued funding for the Parmalee Farm, which, according to its website, will be developed into a nature center.  The logic behind this project is obscure; to encourage tourism and promote their own local businesses, the people of Madison took measures to “adopt their state park” and are organizing social events and attractions there, and this model of promotion is obviously working as Hammonasset State Park is now a household word in Connecticut.  With our own established state park and nature center of Chatfield Hollow already next door to us all, it seems a reasonable approach to follow this successful model and consider “adopting our own state park” of Chatfield Hollow and promoting it as a premier nature center as well as having the park help promote local businesses, and it would cost very little to develop the resources we already have.   Yet instead, after already spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of our money on purchasing the unusable wetlands of the Parmalee farm, our town administrators decided to give much of the property away to a private organization in the hopes it can begin developing its own separate nature center, which so far has shown to be of vague benefit to the town.  Why are we abandoning our pot of gold to chase after rainbows?

We certainly can’t know whether these measures would have been practical for Killingworth as they have been for other towns, but this isn’t the point.  During this time of economic hardship when we’re all required to tighten our belts, we need creative minds with fresh ideas to best employ the resources our town already has.  Our current administration is instead suffering from a failure of imagination, as rather than looking for ways to have our problems resolve themselves like these,  they are simply following the obsolete model of government of spending money we don’t have, as well as throwing good money after bad, as well as increasing taxes to get the public to foot the bill for it all.  Leadership is practiced not so much in words as it is in innovation and action, and we are simply not seeing this here.   

Adding insult to injury, Ms. Iino likewise hasn’t told us she approved and received a massive 3% raise for herself as well as for select town employees, which will be paid for by this tax increase.  The reason this wasn’t mentioned is obvious- it is an admission that our town is becoming too expensive to live in, and it's a situation that’s either directly due to her own policies, or due to the lack of them.  Regardless of whether Ms. Iino wants to admit this or not, the fact remains that demanding we should all make sacrifices so that our town administrators can avoid making sacrifices themselves is unrepentant arrogance unbefitting our elected leaders.  A true leader leads by example, and we are simply not seeing this here either.

Ms. Iino described the Better Choice 2011 political action committee as a group that has no vision for the town, which isn't surprising since she's certainly not about to admit her opponents have a different vision for the town.  However, the problem that Ms. Iino faces isn’t that her opponents have a different vision or even whether it’s a better vision.  The problem that Ms. Iino faces is that the people of Killingworth can no longer afford to pay for her vision.