Submitted by Sage Withrow
And just like that everyone’s favorite biennial past time is here again. What’s that you say? The Ryder Cup? The Olympics? No, of course I’m talking about municipal election season. What’s not to love?
Nothing screams civic responsibility and engagement quite like setting down one’s pumpkin spice latte for a moment to spew some vitriol at your neighbor for (gasp!) daring to hold a slightly different viewpoint than you. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in this year’s contest for the leadership of the BET.
When it comes to the BET, many in town would have us believe that the Republican candidates represent nothing but a group of miserly scrooges clinging to any procedural path to deprive children from an opportunity to learn.
What utter nonsense.
The task of the Board of Estimate and Taxation (BET) is to serve as steward of every taxpayer’s resources. All the Republican BET candidates support the reconstruction of Central Middle School. They also unequivocally support a revamped Old Greenwich School and fully understand that additional, significant, capital projects remain in the pipeline. Conducting and funding a capital improvement cycle of the magnitude facing Greenwich will require steadfast leadership that rises above petty partisan squabbles. It is precisely what makes the role of the BET both exceptionally critical and incredibly difficult.
No great feat of governance is achieved when a single set of interests drives the debate. Resigning ourselves to a position where the BET serves as a rubber stamp to whatever request is presented is the abdication of leadership, sets an incredibly destructive precedent given the amount of infrastructure improvement facing the town and ultimately destroys the civic tissue that binds us.
Of course, we all would love to bequeath our children the Taj Mahal of learning environments; schools that foresee every learning contingency have more than ample space for every form of learning and play. In the case of CMS, it should surprise no one that a project assessed solely from the perspective of what we would like our school to look like rather than what our students actually need results in a proposal that exceeds the community’s ability and willingness to pay for it.
It is important that we not lose the forest for the trees and get mired in what are, at best, early cost estimates. The success or failure of these projects will be a direct result of the constant oversight and tethering of the near-term demands of the individual projects to the long-term health of the town.
Thoughtfulness and careful planning, not partisanship and rancor, will win the day. Through this lens it becomes clear that it is the Republican slate of BET candidates that offer Greenwich voters the best representation of their interests: strong schools, improved infrastructure and long-term stability that upholds our town as a beacon for the rest of the state.
The BET is not the sole decision maker in any of these processes. It is imperative that we as voters remember this November why we have a BET and what its role truly is. The BET is the elected steward of the taxpayers’ resources. Stewardship can not be sacrificed to the emotions of a moment if it is to be effective.
There are clearly very urgent needs all over town. From schools, to police, fire and EMS to DPW – an annual budget of nearly one half BILLION dollars makes that obvious, but we can not forget from where the nearly 8,000 dollars per man, woman and child represented by that budget come. In its most basic sense, every dollar represents a portion of each citizen’s life that has been sacrificed to earn it. The task of the BET is to do everything in their power to ensure that our tax dollars – which otherwise could be spent by the hard working folks who earned them – are put to use effectively and without waste.
Please vote for all 6 Republican BET candidates on November 7 or by absentee ballot.