You’ll have to watch the whole hearing for all of the one-liners and repartee:

But in the Sakonnet Times William Rupp captures the essence of the discussion at last Thursday’s financial town hearing in Tiverton:

Justin Katz, a Tiverton resident who drew up the petition for the no-tax hike budget of $47.3 million, was the target for most of the questions from the floor. He shared the stage with town officials seeking a budget with the modest tax hike.

Katz was not without his supporters, though. Former Budget Committee member Jeff Caron, for one, asked: “Whose bank account should the surplus money be in?”

My budget proposal — the elector petition for which Tiverton residents can vote at the financial town referendum on May 20 — would actually decrease taxes for the individual taxpayer slightly from this year and significantly (32 cents per $1,000 of value on the property tax rate) from what the town officials want.

I wrote up my basic rationale in a letter to the editor to local papers, recently, but the bottom line is this:  The people in town government want flexibility and security for themselves.  They want to build up a slush fund by overtaxing (probably totaling over $1 million by the end of the current fiscal year) that they can use to increase spending later without raising taxes so much that it attracts attention — whether for one-time expenditures or for looming contract negotiations.

They also claim that having this slush fund will help with the town’s credit rating when they go out for even more debt than we’re currently carrying.  I’ve found no evidence that the “unassigned fund” is determinative of credit ratings for debt, and one of the speakers for the other side with some expertise in this area admitted that it’s of less value to ratings agencies to see a big chunk of money sitting in the bank that can be grabbed either for tax reduction, for union contract giveaways, or for other spending.

In March, Tiverton had an unemployment rate of 9.8% (versus Rhode Island’s worst-in-the-nation 8.7%.  During the last decade, the number of residents who are employed almost didn’t grow, and household incomes barely kept pace with inflation.  Yet, property taxes more than doubled.

As I said at the hearing, if I were investing in a town’s ability to tax (which is all a bond is), I’d much prefer to see a flourishing community in which tax increases weren’t so dramatically outpacing the ability of residents to pay for them, rather than a town government on which special interests and ideologues have such a strong hold that they can increase taxes even when they have no need to do so.