Biddeford must be more responsible about city needs

The Biddeford City Council is holding our roads hostage for $12.25 million in ransom from taxpayers. Most people assume that their city tax dollars are spent first and foremost on essential services that include basic things like road maintenance. But that’s not true in Biddeford. Every year, our city councilors add numerous non-essential projects and expenses to the city budget. Then, in the final stages of the budgeting process when the numbers are added up, the councilors suddenly realize that they will be blamed for an unacceptably large tax increase if they don’t cut something. So, instead of cutting non-essential expenses, they slash the city’s road maintenance budget entirely, congratulate themselves on a job well done, and go home.

Once upon a time, the city had a policy whereby the worst roads were repaired or replaced each year, so that over 10-15 years, nearly every road would get a makeover. The city funded this plan with approximately $1.5 million every year. This plan worked to maintain our roads over time. But, about five years ago, the city council began to deliberately neglect our roads as described above. They called the $1.5 million they cut “savings” as our roads got progressively worse.

Last year, the city council proposed three bond referendums to the tune of around $11 million for badly needed road repairs. The voters rejected all three. Instead of interpreting this as the voters’ disapproval of our roads being neglected every year, the city council again cut the $1.5 million road budget in favor of other projects, and the roads have gotten worse. Now, they are proposing two bond referendums: $12.25 million to fix our roads and $3.6 million to do stormwater and sewer separation beforehand. Their attitude is “if the voters reject these bonds, they will only have themselves to blame for our bad roads.” Or, “the voters need to decide what’s cheaper, a tax increase to fix our roads or new suspensions for their cars? If the voters reject this tax increase, it’s only going to cost them more in future car repairs.”

In November, the voters will again have a say. Should we let the city council bundle years’ worth of deliberate neglect into bond referendums that increase our taxes? If we do, next up will be the clock tower. Remember, there was a bond referendum approximately five years ago to repair it, too. It was also rejected by the voters. Since then, the city council hasn’t spent a dime on the tower, instead letting it rot to such a disgrace that, they assume, the taxpayers will eventually vote to increase their own taxes to save it.

I think the answer lies in a referendum that would require the city council to fund essential services that include routine maintenance of our existing roads and buildings before adding any new or non-essential expenses to the city budget. In other words, limit the use of bond referendums to major new programs and other non-essential proposals and not accumulated expenses caused by the deliberate neglect of essential services by our city council.

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