Budget Season Quickly Approaching

One of the aspects which I value the most in life is the human connection with the people I’ve come to know over my relatively short time here on earth. I value it because there is something very special about how we feed off of one another. I guess that is why I’ve always enjoyed growing up in a small community in New England and the similarities I found with Marco Island over the years.

The City of Concord, New Hampshire was a relatively small city given the fact that it was only about 34,000 people and 64 square miles. It was the Capital City for the State of New Hampshire with less than 900,000 residents in 1975. All of this when I started in politics at 26 years of age, first as a City Councilman and later elected as a member of the State’s House of Representatives.

There are 400 members in that Chamber making it the second largest body in the United States next to the U.S. House of Representatives. We proudly held the distinction of only having the U.S. House of Representatives and the English and Indian Parliaments being larger deliberative bodies. This would allow every 2,250 residents to have access to their own Representative, kind of an amazing ratio at those numbers.

Couple that with the fact that we were paid the huge salary of $100 per year for a two-year term, in addition to receiving a free license plate, we were working dirt cheap.

Being from a small community and small state wasn’t a negative in my opinion, and the similarities between the city I came from and the city I’ve adopted as my home shared a number of similarities but would also have some differences.

We would have a City Manager/Council form of governance. We would have eight Ward Councilors and three At Large, and from them would elect a Mayor to run our meeting as well as a Vice Mayor from those 11 sitting elected representatives.

Marco Island voted in 1997 to incorporate, as we felt we might be better stewards of our future. As Ward Councilors we worked hard to ensure the needs of our Ward’s were well represented. My Ward was furthest from the city center and therefore would feel the sting of neglect versus those Wards closest to the center of the city which included some of the more influential. 

Ward One of our city (my Ward) was historically a “mill-town,” and when those mills began shutting down the sting would cut deeper, therefore creating a more pronounced sense of “independence” and feeling the need to seek a greater sense of individuality, similar in many ways to Marco.

That sense of independence would appear via a separate Supervisory Union School District, which ensured the children of my Ward and the adjoining municipality, which sharded closer boundaries between one another, would provide a hybrid sense of community, as certain aspects were shared while others weren’t. This provided the opportunity to educate together, as well as recreate, worship and socialize within the same sphere of influence and not be shuttled six to eight miles away from each other.

The City of Concord did provide the essential municipal services inside my Ward such as public works, recreation, public safety, water and wastewater services as well as transportation services within our separate municipal boundaries.

I guess that is why I find the two Charter Schools within Marco to be so analogous in their creation. The desire of the families to have a greater control over their academic offerings and hold more control over the quality of the product they provide is not so undesirable, in my opinion.

The jury is still out as to whether we have accomplished the goals of better controlling our own destinies in regard to how we manage our affairs. Only time will tell in that regard as well as the individual topics of the day.

I remember a gentleman I served with on the City Council in Concord would refer to a phrase I often find myself using when discussing budgeting. “Are we getting the best bang for our buck?” Simply put he would always push the envelope in regard to whether we are providing the most efficient use of capital to provide the services desired by the residents. I’ve always thought that to be a reasonable question and reflect on it regularly.

By failing to incentivize department heads and employees to find more effective and efficient means to provide services and come in below budgeted numbers, we encourage waste or ineffectiveness for fear of being punished during the next round of budgeting.

As budget season approaches and the hard decisions come front and center we also should be thinking in a more pragmatic fashion as we place the growing needs of our community front and center, balancing the needs and responsibilities of our government to provide for our citizens as we move ahead.