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Sat, 21 Feb 2009
When I was 16, I went SCUBA diving off Jamestown a few times with my friends Nat and Phil. Once, right after we came off the bridge, we headed south to Fort Wetherill, with Phil driving. We passed a police car headed north and a moment or two later Nat said, "There," and pointed at another police car, parked on a side road. "Great," said Phil, and floored it. As we hurtled down the narrow country lane at about 70, I gripped the seat and asked what he meant. "Jamestown only has two police cars," he laughed, "so we can do what we want now."
Needless to say, Jamestown has more than two police cars, now. But why? Did they expand their police force only in order to pad the town payroll? That's what Governor Carcieri would like you to think. Last week, in his State of the State address, the Governor clucked his tongue at the cities and towns, because over the past 20 years, while the state payroll has dropped by a quarter, the total number of municipal employees has gone up by 38%. Shocking, isn't it?
Well, not really. What's shocking is that someone thinks he can run the state with "information" like this: half-digested red meat to be thrown to the angry mobs of talk-radio callers. Let's get real. Town payrolls have gone up because towns have grown, and because of requirements imposed on them. Jamestown has twice as many year-round residents, and many more summer houses, than it did back in the days of two police cars. Rhode Island has about the same number of people as a generation ago, but our little towns are bigger and our cities are smaller. We have spread out across the landscape, and that has real consequences.
Want to know what else Jamestown has that it didn't have a generation ago? Special-ed students who used to be wards of the state, attending the Ladd School. Having special-needs children educated with other children is a good thing, but it's not free. When the state closed Ladd, do you remember how the state gave that money to cities and towns for special education? Yeah, neither do I.
What else didn't Jamestown have back then? Clean-water mandates imposed by the EPA, comprehensive planning laws, bus monitors on school buses, and yes, minimum staffing levels in public safety departments, imposed by the state. Here's the thing, though: all of these requirements were imposed for a good reason. Clean water, good planning, and public safety are all important.
Despite his absurd scolding tone, Governor Carcieri has done us all a service by putting his finger on a big source of the state's fiscal problems. A state that relies so much on local revenue -- property taxes -- is poorly positioned to deal with the effects of people moving around.
When people leave a town, it takes a while to cut the expenses of the services they used, if it's possible at all. If you have a hundred kids in a fifth grade, that's four classrooms. If ten of those children move away, that's still four classrooms, but with less money to pay for them. If a fire station is established to deal with a neighborhood of 500 houses, a town can't close it just because 50 of those houses are now vacant. A shrinking town doesn't need a smaller police department. If anything, experience shows it needs a larger one.
The opposite side of the coin is just as telling. A family with two school-age children moving to some rural town will likely cost that town as much as $30,000 in services, but provide only a fraction of that in taxes. New construction often requires new traffic lights, new water lines, new sewer lines and more. These expenses are never covered by the new tax revenue, and seldom even covered by occasionally imposed "developer impact fees."
In other words, the movement of people from one town to another can raise taxes in both towns. In one town they go up because there are a shrinking number of people to support the same services, while in the other they go up because new residents require more services than they pay for. In a world where cities and towns got more support from the state, this wouldn't matter so much.
While looking into the possible benefits of school district consolidation, I spent some time last year with the budget for Fairfax County, Virginia, part of the DC suburbs. Their school department has about as many students in it as the 36 school departments in Rhode Island. Their spending on administration isn't so much better than ours, so the potential benefit of combining school districts isn't nearly what proponents claim. What they do have, however, is a size that insulates them against the movement of people. When people move from the near suburbs of DC to the farther suburbs, they're moving from one side of Fairfax to the other. The county and school department are still collecting their taxes. Their kids might have a longer bus ride, but that's the only adjustment that needs to be made. Here, though, when a family moves from Cranston to Exeter, they're helping send Cranston's finances into a tailspin, and creating pressures on Exeter's budget that Exeter might not have wanted.
Proponents of school and town consolidation are like the blind squirrel that accidentally finds a nut from time to time. They are on to something valuable, but for the wrong reasons. We don't need super towns like Wesconnaug, or to combine town administrations. We need to come up with a way to fund municipal services that can withstand having people move from one town to another. Not only would this keep a better lid on the growth of taxes, but could ease the pressure on towns to make dumb land-use decisions simply because they need the tax money.
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