Shine the light
To answer the question of how Windham found about a million dollars worth of unexpected surplus, first, you’d need to be an accountant, and second, you’d need to be a fortune-teller. Right now folks, your guess is as good as ours and apparently both of ours together is about as good as the Windham Town Council’s. Which is another way of saying, the town is in the dark.
This isn’t to say any hocus-pocus is going on. The school administration is confident that they know about the $960,000 or $984,000, or is it $1.3 million (we’ve heard several figures) in disputed surplus that we have left over from last year’s budget. They are waiting for an audit to have specific numbers which they say will put minds to rest.
But, what we do know for certain at this point is that the council needs information. They had questions at Tuesday night’s meeting, but no one from the school administration or School Board was there to answer. So, the controversy raged and still rages because answers have not been publicly given.
We also know that this town has a mighty big operating surplus – maybe too big. Like Standish at last year’s Annual Town Meeting when citizens questioned why a small town was running a proportionally large surplus, Windham residents should be made aware of – and should wonder why – their hard-earned tax money is going toward what ends up to be an overgrown surplus that sits and sits, grows and grows, with apparently little scrutiny.
Taxpayers should call for some of this money back. They’ve paid in too much. They know they have, and they should get it back. It may be too late this year, if Councilor David Tobin is correct in saying the deadline is over for rebating taxpayers, but the issue of a large surplus should be debated for next year’s budget. The only reason it wasn’t this year was because no one knew about it. The figures weren’t made public. They miraculously appeared a few weeks after town meeting. They obviously should have been, and why they weren’t is a good question. Perhaps this current frustration will teach us to regulate the size of our surplus.
Tuesday’s confusion-riddled council meeting also points out that the two most important Windham governing boards need to improve their communication with each other. In the past, the two boards have worked together quite well on budget issues in joint sessions. The fact that no member of the School Board was at Tuesday’s predictably contentious meeting shows that either school officials and board members are ignorant of the issues, too busy to come to the meeting or just too afraid to answer the council’s or the public’s questions about the “case of the missing money.”
Raymond would be a good model for Windham to emulate in this case. Raymond is eagerly trying to follow their “One Raymond” principle where the school and town keep in communication and share resources in an effort to cut costs and foster a spirit of teamwork. Whether that concept is working is up to interpretation, but it’s a noble goal and Windham should have their own version of it.
“One Windham,” where school officials are present at council meetings, or vice versa, where important fiscal matters are being discussed. “One Windham,” where town residents receive excess surplus back in the form of rebated taxes because the school and town’s goal is to please the taxpayer first, pad their budgets last. And “One Windham,” where cooperation is paramount because the opposite – non-communication or sterilized and spun communication – leads to frustration and the creation of rumor mills.
The town deserves a quick end to this current struggle. We have good leaders in Windham, both on the town and school sides, and they need to work together to educate each other and the public about this surplus issue.
John Balentine, editor
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