The great government machine has all sorts of ways that officials can shift blame off themselves and ensure that everything is always the responsibility of voters and taxpayers.  If there are budgetary problems, it’s because you haven’t contributed enough.  If more money is needed, it’s more often than not up to you to give more money (even if it’s confiscated in an indirect way), rather than for government to pare down its activities or run with much less waste.

That observation has had a very clear illustration, recently, in Tiverton.

In short, last May, taxpayers voted themselves a 0% tax increase by using about $600,000 of the slush fund above the reserves that are required (and protected from abuse) by the town’s Home Rule Charter.  In setting a bond rating for the town, this November, Standard & Poor’s mentioned that action as a factor in their analysis.

Now, local politicians are priming the rhetoric to use that fact as a political weapon and to justify a bigger tax increase in the next budget.  Taxpayers shouldn’t listen.  Most of what the politicians are saying just isn’t true and is ultimately a decoy away from their bad management… things like letting the firefighters’ union set up a scenario in which a couple of employees out on disability leave can cost the town around a half-million dollars in additional overtime.

For a deep-dive analysis on Tiverton Fact Check, I took the seemingly unprecedented steps of actually communicating with the S&P analysts, figuring out their rating method enough to calculate multiple scenarios, and researching the impact of bond ratings on the actual rates that municipalities pay.  The upshot?

Most of the [officals’] comments are misleading or downright incorrect.  Tiverton was not “downgraded” because voters used some of the town’s unassigned funds at last year’s financial town referendum for a 0% tax increase; money in the town’s reserve fund was not the most significant factor in Tiverton’s bond rating; and failing to achieve a higher bond rating will not cost the town a significant money, if it cost the town anything at all.