[Ed note: My Southborough accepts signed letters to the editor submitted by Southborough residents. Letters may be emailed to mysouthborough@gmail.com.
The following letter is from Al Hamilton.]
To the Editor:
Recently, there have been some misconceptions about the structure of town government and the town’s commitment to providing quality educational facilities. Two of these misconceptions need to be explored further.
We don’t care about education; we just kick the school facilities needs down the road.
This is false. Let’s review the history with respect to school facilities starting in the late 1990’s:
Between 1998 and 2002 the town renovated and expanded Finn School.
At that same time, we built a new middle school – Trottier.
In the mid 2000’s, we funded a renovation and addition to Algonquin.
We then demolished and built a new Woodward.
In the 2010’s we did a mini renovation of Neary.
We recently funded a major renovation of the Algonquin athletic fields, including erecting the Gonkplex.
Every year like clockwork we approve a generous school budget to support our schools.
The reality for the last 30 years is that the debt and attendant debt service related to school building projects has crowded out other pressing needs. We delayed by close to 25 years a needed upgrade to the Police Station and, to a lesser extent, the Fire Station in favor of school facilities. I supported this. Neary got a mini renovation about 15 years ago because the town was “tapped out” with respect to debt capacity to fund its renovation. If you have notice that our roads are in bad shape, that is because we put a priority on schools. That is how we ended up in this situation, not because we did not care about education but because we were fully committed to it.
Taxes will go up regardless
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”
If we keep doing the same thing then, yes, our taxes will continue to outpace inflation. Our municipal headcount has increased over 10% in the last 10 years. Our population is stable. Labor costs drive the cost of local government and the only way to bring these down is to make our municipal workers more productive.
Our business practices look more like the 1950’s than the 2020’s. We need to invest in systems and automation to do many of the clerical and routine parts of government. We need to restructure and consolidate our departments to control our headcount. I don’t want to take a meat axe to our government but every time we have a retirement or a departure, we need to take a hard look at the position and ask “Is there another way we can do this?
It will take 5-10 years to reverse the tax burden shift which is putting a greater percentage of the tax burden on residents. The challenge for the next few years is to manage our way out of the problem. Our population is rapidly aging, over 30% of our residents are now over 55 years old. 9% of our seniors live below the poverty line. It is cruel to continue to ask them to fund outdated and inefficient systems when we can do better by moving into the second quarter of the 21st century.
We, as a community, remain committed to providing the children of our town a quality education. To imply otherwise is disrespectful to the residents who have sacrificed for decades to provide the highly rated system we currently enjoy. We need to reassess how we house our K-8 population within the resources we have available and we need to reassess our municipal practices and procedures. We can’t continue on the path we are on.
Al Hamilton
35 Pine Hill Road
Thank you Al! It’s nice to see somebody gets it