It's heating up in the kitchen!

Wow! That was some Select Board meeting last night! Here is the first of my reports on the events that took place.

Congratulations to Mr. Theodore, 90 and a WWII veteran, who has honored last night. And to the high school students from the TCAN program who were honored as well.

Next was our state rep, Mr. Quinn, who pointed out that perhaps the constant finger pointing at the state might be misplaced. Remember that when pointing a finger, the rest are pointed at you. He noted that as a percentage of our municipal budget, the state support was the highest it has been since 1990. He urged the Select Board to push for implementation of the DOR recommendations from last July. These include joining the state health insurance program. According to his data, the costs for Dartmouth are up more than 70% since 2000 and the state cost are up less than 50% in the same period. Our health care advisors, (EBS Foran?, not sure of the name) presented afterward and, not surprisingly, pointed out some caveats to joining the state program. It is important to keep in mind that they are now paid to manage our health insurance and would not be if we went to the state plan. Generally spreading the cost and risk over a larger group, results in lower premiums over the long run. I think we should do it and need to start working on that right away. Then Mr. Quinn tackled the Voc Tech assessment. He pointed out the Ed reform gives the same amount of money to each child in the state for their education. Under the old formula, we were getting $7-9K per year for a student and paying GNBVT about $4K. He said the money has to follow the child. As a result we owed Voc for the past inequity and going forward must provide all the funds allocated to each student to Voc. Some new information to me was that Dartmouth’s Voc enrollment was up 50 students in the same period from 157 to 208. That explains a lot of the jump in cost as well. His take was that the likelihood of the town prevailing in their suit against Voc was slim and we are wasting our money. Mr. Quinn also noted that Dartmouth should look into getting the Bristol County pension fund to join the state pension fund. While not a way to save money in the short term, the Bristol fund has under performed the state fund number in the 1, 5, 10 and 20 year time frame. This represents a large amount of money that we will have to make up in the future and going to the other fund will prevent that from continuing. Our rep also noted that the real growth in town revenue, when new growth and all other town taxes are considered, is among the top in the state over the last ten years. When asked about Prop 2-1/2, he said that Dartmouth was one of only 60 communities in Mass to have never passed an operational override. He was not encouraging about overturning the 2-1/2 provision.

More in additional posts.

Update - Curt Brown has also blogged about Rep. Quinn here