Things are downright scary. The nation is stalled in a deep recession and joblessness is growing. More people are fearing they will be worse off in the future than ever before.

Yet what is Chatham doing? Maintaining its growth in town spending but shoving what it couldn't fund this year into next year's budget, when the situation will be just as bad, but made worse by this doubling up of deferred costs. On top of that it has launched a 20-year sewer construction program that will drive the town's debt from about $30 million to over $300 million! is this the time for a debt explosion?

Does Chatham have to do the sewer now? No.

Is there a rush to clean up the waters? No. Under the town's program no improvements are expected till 25 years or so when the project is finished. Not only that, Chatham is a guinea pig for the state program's proposed solution for reducing nitrogen, which might not even show any improvement in coastal waters. For the Town Manager to embark upon a total plan for the town costing hundreds of millions of property tax dollars rather than by proceeding incrementally to test out the state's proposed solution in one or two hot spots first is inane.

Can any government agency force Chatham to act now? No. Since this is an unfunded mandate, no government agency can force Chatham to act against its interests.

Will the Conservation Law Foundation sue Chatham? No. Chatham is so far ahead of all other towns in its planning it's the last town CLF would sue.

Will Chatham wind up lagging behind other Cape towns in addressing the problem of excess nitrogen in bay waters? No. Chatham is years ahead of the 13 other Cape towns that have excess nitrogen problems. Some of them are exploring less expensive and better environmental alternatives, others are hoping for state or federal subsidy assistance and some just do not consider the problem a priority in light of their tight budgets and other demands.

More sensibly, Orleans and other towns first want to be satisifed that the plan developed by the state DEP with the scientists in Dartmouth will do the job. For years they've demanded a peer review of the science, which the state and the scientists have refused to allow. Now that demand is growing insistent. Why spend billions for something that might not do the job? It makes sense to make sure it works before committing to such massive expenditures.

When did Chatham town meeting vote to approve a sewer program costing $300-$400-$500 million? It never has. The town manager pushed a vote through town meeting in May 2009 for an upgrade of the treatment plant but didn't tell anybody the upgrade would build the treatment plant out to its planned 20-year capacity in just two years. Instead of just enlarging the treatment plant to handle the few hundred properties being added to the existing system, the Town Manager authoritzed an enlargement for ten times as much, enough to process all the presumably affected watersheds in town. As a consequence, any engineer will tell you taxpayers will be forced to fund the rest of the sewer pipe extension program or else have a malfunctioning, cost-inefficient and sub-performance treatment plant. To convince town meeting members the costs would not be too onerous, the town manager provided town meeting members with false numbers reflected in scaled down bar graphs which were supposed to show what the real costs would look like.

Should Chatham taxpayers be worried about what the economic bad news looks like for Chatham as well as the nation? Absolutely. Savings, dividends and interest payments for Chatham households are all down. Huge tax hikes at the federal level beginning next year are a certainty, so, no matter what, incomes will be slashed. States are cutting local aid and raising taxes as well. This is a time for caution.

What should Chatham do? Two major things need to be done to get the spending situation under control: First, renegotiate public union contracts to reflect the reality of the financial situation of Chatham homeowners. Automatic built-in increases should be a thing of the past. The Town Manager has refused to do this. Second, revise the capacity plans for the treatment plant expansion downward so it will handle efficiently and effectively the properties now on the system and those being added with the $20 million for piping voted at the May 2009 town meeting. Then stop and join Orleans and other Cape towns in demanding a peer review of the state's science. During that review period, objectively and fairly examine the alternatives to addressing the nitrogen removal (however it needs to be done) less expensively and hopefully less disruptively. (The EPA and national environmental organizations favor alternatives such as clusters as better environmental choices.) Following the peer review and its conclusions and the examination of less expensive and disruptive alternatives , the entire resulting plan should be put before a fully informed town meeting or a vote.

Here's a knowledgeable observer's pessimistic view of the next few years.

America’s jobless picture is alarmingly bleak
By Mort Zuckerman in Financial Times
June 7, 2010

We are drifting. We take comfort in bits of good news, but we are in dangerous waters; the Great Recession is being starkly revealed as a global crisis with the US, the traditional engine of recovery, sputtering on every cylinder. The US government responded with dramatic financial support by transferring money to the household sector. But outside of these transfers the personal income of Americans is still declining; the residential market remains stagnant at best; consumer growth is nominal. The only real energy in the economy has come from the cessation of inventory liquidation, which is now the main factor in rising industrial output and any modest improvement in the economy.

The mood of US households is despondent. In May only 11.3 per cent believed they would see their income rise in the following six months, while 16.6 per cent thought they would see it decline. This is the first time in over four decades that more people believe they will be worse off than better. Any massive fiscal and monetary stimulus that might reverse the trend is likely to be politically unsustainable given the growing concern over the exploding national deficit.

Wherever you look the scene is bleak. Leading economic indicators fell in April – unusual at such an early stage in the up-cycle. Jobless claims were up by 25,000 to 471,000. And up again above expectations in the first three weeks of May – raising the four-week moving average to a level consistent with 100,000, or more, net job losses. For the past several months, claims have been nowhere near the levels of 400,000 and less that in the past were consistent with sustained job creation. We are not enjoying the normal cycle of economic improvement. If we were, employment would already have reached a new high and made up all of the jobs lost, as it did during the previous postwar recessions. This time we remain short of the old peak of employment, by an astounding 8.4m jobs. One in six Americans is either unemployed or underemployed. This is not a normal cycle when compared with a typical recession, which sees no more than 2m to 3m jobs lost.

Research by David Rosenberg, chief economist at Gluskin Sheff, reveals jobless statistics behind the headline numbers that are downright scary. More than 6.5m people (more than 45 per cent of the jobless) have not worked for 27 weeks or more, compared with 3.2m this time last year.

Wages are falling; wage cuts are spreading as employers continue to curb costs and remain reluctant to hire. And the amount of excess labour continues to increase. For example, the April payroll surged by 290,000 jobs but the labour force soared by 805,000. In effect, jobseekers are overwhelming the number of jobs that are being created. The broader definition of unemployment, which includes partial unemployment and people who have applied for a job within the past year, is roughly 17 per cent. The headline unemployment rate is back up to slightly under 10 per cent, but this covers only people who sought a job in the previous four weeks.

What is the result of an excessive number of people seeking work, with an average of 5.6 people vying for each job opening? Wage deflation. Average hourly pay has not budged since the turn of the year, including one month in which we had a 0.1 per cent decline in average hourly earnings, something that has not happened since April 2003.

This is an unnervingly jobless recovery. After the kind of strong growth in gross domestic product of approximately 6 per cent we had in the fourth quarter of last year, we would normally anticipate job gains of 250,000 a month. Instead we had an average of 31,000 new jobs in the January and February reports – an unprecedentedly minimal growth after such a strong GDP quarter.

We are going to have to develop policies and government support to deal with the long-term jobless who become less employable the longer they lack a regular job. And long-term unemployment has gone from 2m in June 2004 to 6.7m in April 2010. We may have as many as five to eight years of moderate economic growth. To create the 12m jobs to get back to full employment for both the unemployed and new entries into the labour force, when job losses have not even come to an end, seems almost impossible.

The writer is editor in chief of US News & World Report and chairman and co-founder of Boston Properties.