The results of the 2020 Community Survey should cause officials to reconsider the town’s budget priorities. Many thought they had a mandate to cut the mill rate by reducing the growth in school spending, but now we know otherwise.
The survey shows that the quality of New Canaan’s Public Schools is unambiguously our top priority, while concerns about local tax rates are barely a factor.
The survey confirms that school quality is the primary reason why we move here and why we stay here. It’s the primary reason why 73% of us think New Canaan is a good value for the taxes we pay. Only 14% of us think we should spend less on our schools, while 27% think we should spend more.
Only 14% of us mentioned property taxes when asked for one thing we would change about New Canaan. Only 17% mentioned lower taxes when asked how the town could attract new residents. If there are widespread concerns about our tax rates relative to nearby towns, they aren’t evident in the survey results.
All this should cause us to reconsider the Board of Finance policy of capping growth in the school budget (excluding employee benefits) at 1.5% per year. That’s severe because the school budget is dominated by contractual obligations that grow by more than 3% per year. Sooner or later, the strategy would substantially degrade the quality of our schools.
Some town officials seem to believe that most taxpayers are either unwilling or unable to fund for the full impact of inflation on school costs. There’s no basis in the survey results for either belief. Now we know.
There’s a lot more to the budgeting process, of course. We compare our spending with comparable school districts using best available data; we seek to be in the middle of the pack, and we are. We ask school leaders to exploit cost-saving opportunities that don’t impact education quality, and they do. We analyze answers to many dozens of probing questions about spending requests. And most of all, we look for continuous improvement in educational results, and we’re getting it. Our schools present thousands of amazing success stories looking for adequate funding to sustain them.
We need to stop imposing numerical growth caps that are driven by goals unrelated to educational quality. Proponents of that approach may have thought it was “top of mind” for our townspeople, but for the vast majority it turns out that it wasn’t on their minds at all.
Tom Butterworth is a member of the Town Council but writes in his personal capacity.
Tom, I respect your views on a number of subjects, but your analysis here is so far afield from objectivity that it really belongs on one of the political spin shows.
Let’s start with your first major theme: taxes and tax rates don’t matter. Outside of the fact that a Republican is saying this which is really odd in and of itself, you didn’t mention that taxes/property taxes had the number #1 rank in what people surveyed wanted to change about New Canaan. There were 10 lower responses listed, including improved train service. Using your logic, train service is basically irrelevant to people in New Canaan. I guess we should largely ignore both taxes and train service then in your view, or is that not the case? You also didn’t mention that among the top 10 responses but listed separately was fiscal responsibility/spending (4%) and increase property values/revamp real estate market (4%). Fiscal responsibility/spending should have been in the same category as taxes. What are we taxing people for? To spend obviously. Our town government has already done quite a bit of that and will continue to under your philosophy — we are second in CT in town government spending per resident despite supposedly being a fiscally conservative town.
You spun the data to not include the 57% of people who want to retain (i.e., stay the same or no change) current levels of education spending. Add this to the 15% of residents that want to reduce this spending and you get ~72% that want to have no change or decrease education spending. At least that’s one reasonable interpretation, and no less reasonable than yours.
You also dismissed the fact that between 40-45% of respondents said reasons for why they would leave New Canaan is because of cost of living, state taxes, and local property taxes. These were the top answers.
Yes, a lot of younger parents come for the schools and they leave because of the costs/taxes, yet we can’t survey those that have left so there is inherent selection bias!
Differentiate between excellence in our schools — something we all want to maintain — and what actually drives that excellence (according to the Office of Legislative Research in CT) the vast majority of difference in test scores across the State are due to two factors: 1) educational attainment of the parents and 2) whether the child is coming from a single family home. Educational spending above a certain threshold has diminishing returns on academic outcomes. If it didn’t, how could anyone ethically justify that New Canaan spends a lot more per student than Bridgeport?
Finally, this was a really poorly designed survey. I’m sure survey responses in general would have been vastly different if two facts were mentioned in the beginning: NC has the second highest spending and highest debt per resident. There is huge bias across many parts of the survey, leading one friend who is a college professor to offer our survey as an example to his students of what a deeply flawed survey looks like. Your editorial reinforces how it can be spun using selective uses of data to justify politically liberal policies in spending.
Tom Butterworth is a treasure.
Contrary to what we see in our political sphere, it should not be necessary or appropriate to open an opposing argument with an insult. Respectful dialogue should prevail on this complex and important topic. Better to stick to the merits, where reasonable minds can differ.
James Basch is spot on.
I agree with James Basch. We need to reduce our spending while maintaining school excellence. Defending the status quo will lead to increasing taxes and reduced home values.
I agree with James Basch. New Canaan has the highest debt and the second highest spending in the state of Connecticut. Taxpayers are thankful to hear from the town bodies, particularly the Board of Finance, that they are working to bend the spending curve. Taxpayers are also thankful to hear the town bodies state that their goal is to get our debt level from the current $108 mio down to $100 mio, Please, let this budget cycle be the one where we right this ship.