Submitted by Jeff Ramer
I may have a unique perspective on Greenwich’s Board of Estimate and Taxation, its “BET”. When I step off the BET at the end of December, it will complete 16 years of service. I am deeply grateful to this Town that entrusted me with this opportunity, and I hope that I repaid the Community by the caring and hard work that I devoted to the task.
The BET has morphed in recent years to a very different animal from the Board on which I served beginning in 2008. Gone is the terrific Republican Old Guard. Those people worked cooperatively with the Democrats, sharing information, bringing creative ideas, and measuring prudence. Our work product was an amalgam of twelve people working together for the best interests of the Town. There was cordiality and consensus, not politics. Party-line votes were exceedingly rare.
We have historically been a Republican Town. At times our citizens may not have been particularly interested in municipal affairs. They did not need to be. At municipal elections, voters tended to vote their customary Party loyalties. Most often in the past, the votes cast for Republican candidates exceeded the votes cast for Democrats.
To the few in Town who may still not know, the BET holds the purse strings, which bestows considerable control over Town affairs. It has twelve members, six Republicans and six Democrats. The Party whose six members aggregate the greater total number of votes at the last municipal election names the Chair. The Chair enjoys a tie breaking vote. That tie breaking vote has rested in the hands of the Republicans. As we have discovered, that tie breaking vote gives the dominant Party the power, if it is poorly motivated, to wholly ignore its colleagues in the minority Party.
In recent years, extreme partisanship has wrested control of the Republican Town Committee. I do not need to repeat here their astonishing public statements and actions, or the blatant misinformation over the recent months. Perhaps it tracks a national Republican agenda. Whatever its source, it is destructive.
Each of our Republican members of the BET are obliged to look to the Republican Committee every two years for their nomination to return to their seats on the BET. Fail to implement their Party dictates and you are gone. Banished, just as this Republican Committee threw out the old Republican Guard that had served this Town so well in years past. Control of the BET thus rests solely in six people appointed by and beholden to the new Tea Party Republican Committee. The result is predictable.
An unwelcome extreme austerity has been imposed upon the Town. In a simple minded and short sighted process, performance of the BET has been made to be measured only in the artificial suppression of the mill rate and the rejection of capital projects. Long term effect was ignored. The fruits of that strategy are found in ceilings of a grade school that collapsed into classrooms, a middle school condemned from occupancy, twenty-two year old fire trucks unable to respond, Town assets unprotected from successive floods, deteriorated athletic fields, schools and Town owned buildings forever not ADA compliant, absence of organized bicycle routes, a worrisome accumulation of unaddressed capital projects, and a traffic, pedestrian and parking mess.
All the while, in a parade of party-line votes, the Republican members of the BET marched in lock step, wielding the tie breaking vote, voting against each of these areas of need, including rejection of the proper renovation of Julian Curtiss School and rejection of the renovation of Old Greenwich School.
When the School Board became concerned about the structural integrity of Central Middle School, the Republican controlled BET on party-line votes refused for two successive years to fund an engineering inspection. I guess they didn’t want to know. The School Board ultimately cobbled the money together from bits and pieces of other funds, and the resulting engineering report horrified the Town Building Department, who ordered the School vacated and closed. It is familiar recent history to all of you that when the bipartisan School Board returned with the plan to build a replacement School, the Republican members on the BET quibbled over design and scale, successively rejecting
funding to complete the new School, but all the while touting themselves as the ardent supporters of the Project.
The completion of Central Middle School was funded only when two retiring Republican members of the BET joined with their six Democratic colleagues. The four Republican BET members who are running for re-election all voted again against the funding or abstained.
In recent years, the moderates on the Board have been the Democrats, firmly supporting the programs and initiatives that they knew to be appropriate for the long term. Their effort has been to maintain a calm patience, enduring the lack of information and collegiality, as well as the steady drumbeat of public misinformation.
To the silly signs declaring “Stop the Highrises”, there has never been a single candidate from either Party who has proposed or supported “Highrises”. The BET did support on a strong bipartisan vote the use of $1.1M of Federal funding sourced from the American Rescue Plan Act (not our tax dollars) for Affordable Housing, partly to benefit our workforce (teachers, police, fire) and partly to find some relief from the steady onslaught of private developer applications under 8-30g. The bipartisan BET support for Affordable Housing has nothing to do with “Highrises”.
And to the signs that declare “Keep Taxes Low”, know that in the only two years (2018-2019) that the Democrats controlled the BET, the mill rate increases on taxes were 0.00% and 2.75%, far lower than the average mill rate increases in the ten preceding years of Republican control of the BET. Nor did the Democrats implement a penny of long term financing.
Lastly, to the signs that declare “Keep Local Control of Zoning”, there has never been a single candidate from either Party who has proposed or supported ceding our local zoning control to the State.
Each of these notions are just crazy stuff, cut from whole cloth.
Sixteen years is a long time to serve on a Town Board. It is right that people should move on, opening opportunity for fresh ideas. I am tired. I miss the collegial process of years past, and I weary of the nonsense from today’s Tea Party version of the Town Republican Party.
It is important to vote on November 7th . It does not matter what may have been your customary political loyalties. At hand is the necessity for you to recognize the consequence of the tie breaking vote on the BET and for you to push back against a misguided extremism, restoring a balance and sanity at the BET. That tie breaking vote needs to be shifted to the Democrats, which is accomplished when you vote for the six Democratic candidates for the BET.
Jeff Ramer.