Washburn: He's Back

After much personal reflection and amazement of the performance of the current mayor and majority of the city council, I have come to the conclusion that the time has come to seek re-election as an at-large city councilor.

In the iconic 1976 movie Network, the protagonist actor Peter Finch proclaims “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” In a normal Concord municipal election, 85% of the potential voters end up by voting with their feet by not voting with the false belief that their ballot will not influence the results and alter their life as a Concord resident. Two years ago, the voter turnout changed in order to “bell the cat” of an out-of-control school board hell bent on delivering an unwanted and unneeded new middle school in an inappropriate location.

So why would there be pushback aimed at the city council? A close examination of their record of extravagant spending explains why. The council authorized the purchase and improvements for the former Employment Security building to an amount in excess of $3M and at first rejected a bid from a prominent Concord developer of $1,750,000 before selling it to a Vermont millionaire for a mere $155,000 which included an on- street city parking lot. The former mayor boasted that the city would now be collecting @$275,000 a year in property taxes which will be used to pay off the $3M plus interest which will take multiple decades.

And then there was the new clubhouse for Beaver Meadow. The entire city breathed a sigh of relief when the original plan was reduced in terms of square footage and cost. The administration purposely withheld the revised architectural plans and detailed cost breakdown, knowing there might still be public pushback. So, the council was clueless when it approved the new plan. When a councilor asked the mayor if he had seen the revised plans of cost breakdown he replied, “No, but I trust the administration.”

For the past two budget cycles at the mayor’s request, the council has appropriated $150,000 a year to fund downtown events from the Economic Development Reserve Fund at the city manager's discretion with no council oversight. The manager in order to assure complete plausible deniability, assigned this task to a group of city hall staffers. The most notable award last year in the amount of $20,000 supported the Coffee Festable. Be assured that not one dollar of the $300,000 has been or will be spent on legitimate economic development. Not one of these awards will lead to the creation of one job that the holder could afford to rent a market-based rental unit.

I’m not a registered lobbyist or a front for a special interest group and I’m not mad as hell, yet, but I promise to be a loud and proud voice for fiscal sanity and the Concord property taxpayer again. I intend to work with the minority of city councilors who legitimately care about the tax burden currently placed on the backs of our beleaguered property taxpayers. We are at a tipping point with reassessments coming which will lower the tax rate but significantly increase the average property taxpayers annual bill and will put undue pressure on older homeowners.