Downsizing Brattleboro

Here’s what I got out of the budget discussion at Tuesday’s Selectboard meeting:  “We’re broke.  Must close library, sell parks.”  Now I know that they didn’t actually advocate for any of these draconian changes, but these items were mentioned, and somehow that became my takeaway from the meeting.  Unnecessary frills may have to be eliminated because important things like police and fire facilities must be built and next year we’ll need a new grader.

Welcome to the new reality, folks: Towns can no longer afford themselves.  

Leaving aside the obvious question, where then shall we live?, it nevertheless amazes me that a town that has been able to afford its parks and library for over 100 years is now envisioning a future so dim that they would even hint at cutting them.  

I would have been less alarmed by these intimations of disaster if the discussion had been more comprehensive.  For instance, the new police and fire facilities that the town is building, with Representative Town Meeting reps’ approval, will cost over $14 million. Spending to date has been only a fraction of that, meaning it should be a stoppable project.  But somehow the police and fire facilities did not warrant a mention except by John Allen, who is on the Police Fire Oversight Committee and had announced earlier in the evening that the public was invited to comment on the designs.  Very nice to hear, but not so nice to hear about “downsizing” the town when it’s clear the town is upsizing its police and fire stations.

Our values are reflected in our priorities.  No one’s saying we don’t need police and fire protection or that we shouldn’t try to give them what they need to do their work, but do they need all that?  More to the point, before we go making plans based on logic alone, we need to think more thoroughly about what it is to be a town, both practically and spiritually.  Yes, spiritually.  Places have their own spirit and ours does too.  I worry that we’re going to kill it, committing cultural suicide in the service of conforming to federal standards and guidelines and making sure we maximize our grant money.  I worry still more that those in charge of us don’t get that there’s more to a town than its budget.  

But as usual, it isn’t just Brattleboro that’s suffering from fiscal insecurity.  Towns and cities across the country are facing absurd shortages, and why, I don’t know.  The Chicago school system declared itself to be one billion dollars in the hole and promptly laid off 3,000 teachers and paraprofessionals.  Ouch.  But hey, they’re doing better than Detroit which is going bankrupt.  

Of course, not all municipalities are miserable.  Some of them are going gangbusters right now, but even that has its problems.  Take Brooklyn, for instance, the nations cultural darling for the better part of a decade, where spirialing rents have pushed out even some of the early gentrifiers.  Can’t afford big city rents, can’t afford small town taxes — what’s a middle class body to do?

This brings us to the true purpose of towns and cities.  It all started because people have bodies and they have to live somewhere.  Governments were created to oversee life in the towns and cities that came into being when bunches of people decided to live in particular places.  They exist because we do.  If all the people were to leave a town, the town would cease to exist.  The land would remain but the town would be gone — ghost towns are what we call them.   

So if we were to say, “let’s all suffer to keep the town going,” we would be putting the cart before the horse.  The town is here to keep us going, not the other way around.  If it gets too expensive to keep the things we want going, we need to start looking at why that is and then try to address those larger issues. 

Patrick Moreland stated that Brattleboro is become unaffordable to many of the people who live here.  He was not talking about just the poor when he said this.  He’s talking about the middle class — the taxpayers, the business owners, the so-called bedrock of our society.  

If the town thinks the problems have to do with spending per se, they’re missing the bigger picture.  Senator Bernie Sanders addressed that bigger pic in his letter to constituents about the federal minimum wage.  Here is what he said:

“Increasing wealth and income inequality in the United States is the great moral and economic issue of our time.  It speaks to whether we will be a nation with a vibrant and growing middle class, or an oligarchic form of society in which a handful of incredibly wealthy families control our economic and political life.

In America today, the top 1% owns 38% of our country’s financial wealth. The bottom 60% owns all of 2.3%.  In the last several years, 95% of all new income has gone to the top 1%.  Sadly, we recently learned that in 2012 the top 40 hedge fund managers in the country earned $16.7 billion dollars, as much as 300,000 public school teachers combined — almost a third of all high school teachers in America.  How’s that for national priorities!”

The problem of Brattleboro’s tight budget is related to people being gentrified out of their city neighborhoods and that’s related to the people who can’t afford their town anymore and have to move which is all related to the 1% who have taken all the money and are now holding us hostage with it.  We can’t plan our way out of this one, nor will endless budget cutting do the trick.  We need to reverse course and change our priorities so that the wealth disparity in this country ceases to be on a par with that of ancient Rome.  Otherwise, forget quality of life — that will prove to be unaffordable.