Follow up to my last entry over the budget. What can we do?

   Well I was surprised that when I crunched the numbers that commercial property only accounts for $22 million. I think of all the progress and all the businesses we have and I couldn't fathom that, but after researching it further I have to say that is the number. There was some insinuation by some people that I was misleading people by quoting numbers. The problem is those numbers came from the FinCom meeting. I gave the numbers that were quoted.
   You can go on the Town of Dedham site and the budget proposal is there. The only problem I had coming out of that meeting was yet again an increase in taxes. I decided to do more digging. So I have the link to the section in Globe South listing the towns most increased. 

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/regionals/south/2014/02/27/mega-tax-chart/TkS6C1x69iuIzntOsTdGzM/st...

   Only Avon had more of an increase over the last decade then us. We have the 9th highest average tax rate of all of the towns listed. While we do benefit from Legacy place and that probably factored into the last 4 years not being quite as bad, the facts remain that that is still a very high number. We do have projects coming off the books. The Debt Schedule did decrease by $850,000. The SMA project and the East Street phase 2 came off this year.
   Like many of you I'm unhappy that we are going to have another increase. That increase depends of the amount of state funding our town gets, but it will be an increase. Yes over the past five years the increments of increase have been less. Overall though 68% is a big number. I've had this debate here and I've had it out and about in town. The number isn't the last five years the article covers ten years. 
   One problem is we have seniors who still own homes and we have a demographic of people who's children are long out of school. They are paying for schools their children will never use. We have Seniors who while they get a small abatement are also paying for those projects. Those folks don't have a senior center and many others are close to the age that they would want to utilize one. Another thing to consider is even though all of these projects had a majority vote not every citizen voted for these things. I personally had a child school age living in my home so I agreed with the projects and I am a huge supporter of education. We should give the schools every dollar we can. Children are our future.
   In comes why I think we need to do a residential exemption. For all the money we have taxed, the citizens haven't gotten back much in return. To do this and do it effectively we need to take good look at the budget. We don't want to do something that has an adverse affect on core services and would cause departments to not be able to function effectively, but by proposing an exemption and having this go to town meeting it forces us to look at the budget more closely to see where we can see possible waste and then see what we can do instead of this continued cycle of simply just taxing.
   The next thing we need is more revenue. I think down the road as the Endicott Estate continues to fine tune its business model it can be even more self sustaining and may bring in some revenue that we can use to supplement a small portion of the budget. I don't think it will make a huge impact but it is a start. I have proposed a civic complex to bring in revenue. I have a blog entry about the particulars of what this complex would be. While this would be a costly venture I would look to use a portion of the Reyes fund and would try to find grants that we could obtain to help fund the project. 
   The bottom line is unless we come up with more revenue streams taxes will continue to be a problem. A residential exemption as much as we all deserve it is only a band-aid solution to a bigger problem. We aren't Boston so realistically we are only going to be able to do this at a small percentage rate.
   The example that always seems to come up is Norwood. I hear all the time why is Norwood paying less in taxes? Well they have had a 50% increase in the last decade so they aren't far behind us. The reason their rate is so much less is they have revenue streams we don't have. They have their own power plant, they have their own reservoir for water and they have their own cable and the Norwood Civic Center is also a revenue stream. I based my complex on their center only on a bigger scale. They are similar size to Dedham and their population and citizen base is also similar but realistically speaking that town is structured very differently.
   I think proposing the residential exemption is a solid start. It forces transparency in our budget. It will force us to look more closely at line items, but without more revenue streams to supplement the budget this will be a continuous problem.
   Now I want to address the Assessors office. I do think we need to look into their process to see if reform in that office is necessary. I'm not accusing anyone of being crooked but the assessed values are high and I gave examples of things I've heard from citizens about living space and assessing someone higher for following the law about insulating for a boiler. It could be that the assessors office could be applying the laws for assessing these things incorrectly. We really won't know until we sit down with them and ask them what the process is. I think I misspoke and it caused some folks to be misled and that's not what I want to do. 
   I'm trying to inform people as best I can. I don't always have the answer but I will try to get it. The problem we have is we don't have enough people willing to be informed and then they complain. I'm guilty of that myself. Anyone that reads the Dedham Times will know that. Hopefully this clarifies some things from my last blog entry. I answered as best I could and gave my opinions about what I think we need to do. I'm going to continue to do all I can to earn one of your two votes.