When it comes to budgets, with the possibility that the town will take hundreds of thousands of dollars more from taxpayers than even the Town Council and Budget Committee want, the numbers can become confusing.  It helps to narrow the question down and answer the pieces one by one.  For this post, I’ll address the question of whether both budgets use the new casino gambling revenue for tax relief.

They do not.  As the following chart shows, Budget #2 will collect almost exactly the same amount of tax as the town is collecting this year.  That means it is spending every penny of casino revenue.  Budget #1, on the other hand, lowers taxes by $562,218, which is direct tax savings from the casino’s revenue.

Both budgets will lower the tax rate, but that is because the total value of property in the town went up, so the tax burden is distributed more broadly.  However, in future years, the casino revenue will already be built into the taxes.

Sanford Mantell and the Town Council and School Committee members who obviously helped him put together his budget petition are not backing down.  They insist that they did not make a math error that they obviously made. Even more, they are saying that the town treasurer signed off on their calculations, which she says she did not do.

At a special Town Council meeting on Wednesday, Council member Tricia Hilton waved around a piece of paper claiming that multiple accountants had reviewed Budget #2 and found its math to be correct.  On the paper (she said) were different ways to calculate the total taxes for the budget, accounting for “abatements,” which are taxes that the town doesn’t expect to be able to collect.

Every year, the Budget Committee accounts for abatements by figuring out the total tax levy, based on the spending allowed by the budget, and then adding the assumed abatements.  This way, the town is allowed to collect more tax than it needs so that it won’t matter that some amount of it won’t come in.  This year, the number was $30,000.  Mantell and Company, all of whom should have known how this works, instead added the $30,000 in total spending.

That was incorrect and may create budgeting problems if Budget #2 wins, but it isn’t the most embarrassing error or the biggest problem.  The following image shows the relevant column of Hilton’s paper and language for Budget #2 as it will appear on the ballot.  The two circled numbers should be the same, but they are not.  If voters approve this budget, the town won’t be able to collect enough money to cover the spending that voters will have authorized.

In order to mislead people, Hilton’s table shows $37,872,048 as a “subtotal,” but it is not.  It is the total tax.  Abatements can come from both motor vehicle taxes and real and tangible property taxes.  If you add Mantell’s numbers together, they do not equal the total.

Worse, because voters will have approved a higher amount of spending than the budget calls for, the gap will be twice as large.

Given errors in the budget petition submitted by Tiverton resident Sanford Mantel, the authority of the Board of Canvassers to keep petitions off the ballot has become a topic of conversation.  Some participants in that conversation have noted that, last year, I told the Board of Canvassers that they had to put elector resolutions on the ballot even if they’re illegal.  That was correct, then, and still is.

When the Board of Canvassers met in 2018 to certify the budget proposals and resolutions for the ballot, then-Solicitor Anthony DeSisto showed up at the meeting without notice to electors who had put in petitions and told the Board of Canvassers that multiple resolutions were “illegal.”  He had no written opinion and offered a patchwork of explanations — according to the solicitor, some were’t related to the budget, some might violate other sections of the charter, and some were against this or that state law.  The Board decided that it had to follow the advice of the Town Solicitor and blocked the resolutions.

According to the charter, the Board of Canvassers has the authority to “certify” budget petitions (that is, budget proposals from citizens) and elector resolutions (which are questions or statements that citizens want to put before voters).  This certification is (or should be) entirely a question of whether the petitions correctly followed the steps to appear on the ballot.  In 2017, for example, several school committee and town council members attempted to put in a budget petition, but they didn’t correctly include the line items or a statement to “remand” the budget to the Budget Committee.  The Board of Canvassers followed the solicitor’s advice and kept the budget off the ballot, a decision that a Superior Court judge affirmed, at least for the purposes of deciding not to force the petition on the ballot.

In 2018, the Board of Canvassers did something different.  Even though there was no question that the petitions had been put in correctly, the Board passed judgment on the content and invalidated the petitions.  Again, a judge did not force the resolutions on the ballot.

This year, Mantel’s petition does not accurately provide the numbers that the charter requires him to provide.  Current Town Solicitor Giovanni Cicione gave advance notice to the public and prepared a written memo suggesting that this meant it didn’t correctly follow the steps to appear on the ballot.  In other words, it is more like the 2017 case than the 2018 case.

It would have been more like the 2018 case if the petition had done something that the solicitor claimed was illegal.  For example, a petition might try to cut the school budget more than the law allows or attempt to create new fees or taxes or something else that is outside of the ability of the FTR.  Those petitions ought to be put on the ballot, and their opponents should campaign against them saying they’re illegal and unenforceable.

Based on the Board of Canvassers’ decision last week, electors don’t have to put the required numbers on the ballot, but can put any numbers at all, which could destroy the FTR process.  Even worse, the Board is making decisions with no clear guiding legal principles, to the point of going against the appointed Town Solicitor who is charged with reviewing these matters on the town’s behalf.