Reporter's Notebook
How many questions can a single ballot pose?
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By STEPHANIE M. PETERS Rutland Herald - Published: January 4, 2010
Welcome to the New Year and the ballot question edition of this column.
With less than a month until the deadline for preparing the Town Meeting Day ballot, requests continue to pour into City Hall to place before the voters a variety of questions.
This week, aldermen are presented with the financial aid requests of eight nonprofit agencies and a letter from a resident who'd like to see the annual municipal elections pushed back from the first Tuesday in March to the third Tuesday in April.
According to resident Dick Courcelle, who also serves as a city school commissioner but writes the letter to aldermen on his own behalf, current practice doesn't "provide either the Board of Aldermen or the Board of School Commissioners sufficient time to thoughtfully develop spending plans to present to City voters.
"I do not believe that budget plans developed by mid-January, to be ready for the ballot on the first Tuesday in March, are based on enough solid valuation data that drive tax rates during the next fiscal year," Courcelle writes. "Such early projections of expenses and revenues may also result in too much uncertainty and guesswork, with the risk that the plan developed will be either too limited or too far-reaching in scope."
In general, Courcelle makes the same point argued by several aldermen during last month's budget discussions, so it will be interesting to see if city officials buy into this suggestion.
As for the requests of the nonprofits – which typically tack a few extra cents onto the municipal tax rate – so far the city has received eight totaling $298,683.
Broken out, those requests include $36,975 for the Southern Vermont Council on Aging; $27,500 for the Boys and Girls Club of Rutland County; $46,140 for the Marble Valley Regional Transit District, also known as The Bus; $43,000 for the Rutland Area Visiting Nurse Association and Hospice; $35,900 for the Association for Retarded Citizens, Rutland Area; $10,000 for the Rutland County Women's Network and Shelter; $30,000 for Rutland Mental Health Services; and $69,168 for Regional Ambulance Service
Ballot or novel?
And just how many individual questions can fit onto a Town Meeting Day ballot?
With everyone from nonprofit agencies to the mayor and aldermen to average residents stepping forward with proposals for ballot questions, it seems we might find out.
In addition to the school and municipal budgets, elections for aldermen and school commissioners and the requests of nonprofit agencies, already aldermen have added to the ballot a bonding question for the Community Center @ Giorgetti Park. This month they have a meeting scheduled to discuss how the city will fund a 10 percent local match for transportation infrastructure projects like the routes 4 and 7 project and Ripley Road Bridge replacement. That could lead to a March ballot question.
The group Rutland United Taxpayers has secured enough signatures to get three of its five proposals on the ballot, including two questions, one for municipal employees and one for school employees, requesting they begin paying 20 percent of their health care premiums and another that would impose 10-year term limits on the mayor and aldermen.
Two weeks ago, Rob Towle – another city school commissioner acting as a resident – asked aldermen to consider a simply worded question asking if Rutland residents support the relicensing of Vermont Yankee, should it be proven to be safe. The aldermen sent the proposed question to the Community and Economic Development Committee rather than approving it during the meeting, so it should be up for debate again sometime this month.
Waiting for a vote
In other ballot news – don't expect a decision tonight about how the municipal budget will appear to voters in March. Board President David Allaire said last week that his preference will be to talk tonight about having that discussion in front of the cameras at the Jan. 18 full board meeting.
stephanie.peters@rutlandherald.com
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