The taxpayers could have won the budget battle at Town Meeting, Monday, May 1lth, but lost 456 to 342. The Cape Cod Times said the budget battle was “close.” It was. With just a shift of 58 votes, the deficit budget presented to Town Meeting by the Town Administration would have gone down to defeat.

This was the first challenge to a budget in at least ten years.

I am sorry to say that your lead spokesman Fran was largely responsible for the loss. I made two critical mistakes and bungled my presentation.

At the outset of the meeting, Judy Thomas, a League of Woman Voters poobah, jumped up during the routine adoption of rules and moved that a speaker’s time limit be cut to three minutes from the traditional five. Strange position for an organization dedicated to open debate. (Later, the moderator said this had never happened before in his long history of town meetings.)

I I thought that was so absurd no one would support it. I didn’t know town meeting. It passed easily without discussion. I should have got to my feet and said that speakers had prepared their remarks for serious debate and it would undercut the democratic process to reduce the time at the last minute like that. In my case, the 15 minutes I had written was pared down to five minutes through hours or work. In the few minutes before debate on Article 6 began the rule change should never have occurred. If I had spoken, I believe five minutes would have been retained as the speaking limit. My fault. But the forces that wanted to limit the speaking time of the opponents of the Town speinding had won a critical victory.

I then made my second mistake. In going up to speak I should have asked for the Moderator’s discretion to allow extra time since I had carefully prepared for five. I think I would have received some indulgence, because he knew I was the principal speaker and he’s a fair man.

The short of it is that I tried to hurry through, got lost in my notes, rattled myself and did a very poor job of making the taxpayer’s case and probably persuaded nobody.

In any group, there’s always some small percentage which hasn’t made up its mind – 10% is a reasonable guess, which is 80 votes. If we had shifted just 58 votes we would have won. We didn’t do that and I take the blame for that. I blew the opportunity we had to win.

For those interested in how I was going to describe what is going on in Chatham, the remarks I would have given are here. StopOvertaxingOverspending I believe every word of what’s written.

The indifference of some town leaders to the hardships being faced by a sizeable number of taxpayers is startling. One selectman even took the microphone to ridicule the idea that bad economic times and suffering taxpayers should in any way affect the way Chatham does business. To put it another way, it’s as if he said, “Chatham’s a yacht, not a ferry boat. If it’s too rich for you, get off.”

It’s that kind of attitude that demonstrates why there is a need for some group to represent taxpayers of modest means who don’t want to be forced to abandon Chatham.

Despite several statements about how the Town is always looking out for the little guy, a budget raising the property tax levy $770,000 to fund pay raises of 6 and 7% for town employees passed; a $17 million bloated repeat of the Community Center fiasco was kept alive; the emergency fund was invaded when there is no emergency to pay for overspending; and a $300 million sewer project was given a sendoff without one taxpayer knowing what it’s really going to cost. As for the sewer, no one quarrels with the desirability of cleaning up the nitrates in the waterways. Since Chatham often seems to find the most expensive way to do something, one does wonder whether once again the Town is buying a Ferrari when a Toyota or even a BMW would do the job. In the months ahead, we may find out.

We did receive a report that at least one selectmAn expressed himself as "shocked" at the size of the negative vote on the budget, saying that they have their "work cut out for them." Whether that means more concern for the taxpayer or a campaign to justify the high levels of taxation and spending remains to be seen. The better guess is that town officials now realize that taxpayers are upset that their interests are not being adequately taken into account.

At the second night of Town Meeting, the affordable housing proposals, which had been reformulated after having been rejected last year, were rejected again. The proposals dealt with allowing apartments that would qualify under the Affordable Housing quota in residential, commercial and industrial areas. There seemed to be more interest in working out a solution for the commercial area and what seemed to be very constructive comments were made by Town Meeting members.

The proposed charter revision (Article 31) was passed with well over the necessary two-thirds vote. The most important new provision authorizes the Finance Committee to enter the into the budget process earlier, at the same time as the Selectmen, Hopefully the Finance Committee will exercise the same powers as the Selectmen to require how information is presented.

Of the Finance Committee meetings we attended, an inordinate amount of time was asking for information that should have been available beforehand. Also, conscientious members of the FinCom had to do laborious work to put details together to get overall pictures of costs and trends that should have been presented that way in the first place. Needless to say, because so much minutia is offered without accompanying big picture tables, graphs, trend lines and other overall views and statistics, often discussions get bogged down in discussing $10,000 and similar small items. That should change if the Finance Committee is to be the critical analyst to help control spending it is intended to be.

Chatham Concerned Taxpayers expresses its thanks to all those who voted for the taxpayer Monday night, the speakers who spoke and those who helped with leaflets over the weekend and in the run-up to Town Meeting. We also thank all those who donated to this effort. We spent less than $1,000. All communication was by email except for a few ads in the Chronicle (that’s where most of the money went, and for the flyers).

Phil Dupont and Fran Meaney read the Cape Cod Chronicle article back in January about the proposal for a $1.3 increase in the Chatham Town budget and decided this was crazy for these economically distressed times and decided to do something about it. Chatham Concerned Taxpayers was the result. We said our role was to be that of "Paul Revere," sounding the alarm that taxation and spending needed to reined in.

People were awakened to the danger and spoke with a loud voice at Town Meeting. Those voices need to continue to be sounded loud and clear. There are serious challenges looming. The battle has been joined, progress has been made, but victory still lies ahead.