Special Town Meeting

There are 6 items to be voted on. Article 1 - authorizing progress on getting high speed internet - is a no brainer. Only a neanderthal would vote no. Article 6 is a technical matter involving $1,020, and is hardly worth mentioning.

Article 4 seeks authority for the library trustees to start down the path for a new - and very expensive - library. It looks like it will go down to overwhelming defeat, but don't get complacent, come to the meeting to make sure.

Articles 2 and 3 propose two different versions of the regional school agreement. One of them is the version put forward by the school committee and the other is the version put forward by the selectboard. The only difference is that the former would permit a school in the district to be closed by the vote of 4 of the 5 towns, whereas the latter would preserve the right of a town to veto an attempt to close a school in that town. This has been the subject of very heated debate and strongly held views on both sides.

I have no strong feelings about either version. But I intend to vote "yes" on both versions, because there is a financial impact, albeit not a huge one. That impact is this: If there is SOME agreement, Egremont will pay about $12,000 less as its school assessment next year than if there is NO agreement. So some agreement is better than no agreement.

Incidentally, the warrant wrongly states that the finance committee recommends approval of the selectmen's version and disapproval of the school committee's version. I think the finance committee's position is the same as that outlined above, but they'll announce their position at the meeting.

I'll do a separate posting on Article 5, the police station, in a day or so. In the meantime, make your positions known and COME TO THE MEETING!!

Selectmen Votes and the Egremont Taxpayers Association

There's an election on Tuesday, and I know who I'm voting for because I know where the candidates stand on the issues I care about. I can't imagine an office holder or candidate refusing to disclose his or her position on an issue if asked about it (although I know there may be a lot of wishy-washyness in that position).

Do you think Egremonters are entitled to know the positions of the selectmen on important issues? I do. One important issue is the library. But when I asked the selectmen to state their positions on the library at the informational meeting last Saturday, the response was some gobbledygook about how the selectmen were entitled to keep their views to themselves just like other voters. But they're not just other voters, they're elected officials whose positions we voters are entitled to know.

This is a good example of why the new effort to form an Egremont Taxpayers Association will hopefully be successful. One of that Association's objectives is to hold candidates' forums at which voters can find out what the candidates' positions are. The old Egremont Civic Association used to do that, but, alas, it died several years ago. If you're interested in the Egremont Taxpayers Association, send an email to Frank Penglase at penglase@verizon.net.

Water Company

The red ink just goes on and on. At the session appointing a new water commissioner (I applied but the commissioners and selectmen were having none of that), one of the commissioners, by posing a loaded question to the candidates, essentially said the water users were already paying too much and couldn't pay any more and the taxpayers would just have to suck up to it.

Do you suppose the commissioners will ever focus on getting their financial house in order by cutting costs, not coming back to the taxpayers to solve the water company's problems? I'm not aware of any constitutional right that the users have to be subsidized by the rest of us. I suspect that in the long run it would be cheaper for the taxpayers to pay for the users digging their own wells rather than pay a continuously rising subsidy.

Special Town Meeting

There will be one on November 6. It is very important. Voters will be considering (a) whether to go ahead with a new library, estimated cost in the millions, (b) whether to go ahead with a new police station, estimated cost $425,000, (c) which of two versions of a new school agreement to approve, and (d) whether to approve a resolution authorizing the selectmen to participate in a broadband consortium. (There is one other minor item on the agenda.)

The broadband resolution makes me a little queasy becasuse it gives the selectboard pretty much a blank check to do - and spend - whatever they wish. (They'll tell you that's not what it means, even though that's what it says.) But high speed computer access is so important that I'd probably authorize pretty much anybody to pursue it.

I will comment on the other matters in due course. I invite others to comment as well.