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The Merchants of Spending
Ted Tripp, North Andover Taxpayers Association

Did you know that the average single-family tax bill in North Andover is now $5,500? That’s up $212 dollars from last year and a whopping 48 percent (!) just since the year 2000. It was a mere $3,724 that year — sounds like a bargain today.

At this rate, and with the prospect of new overrides ever present, your tax bill could easily become a whopping $6900 or more by 2010. That’s a mere four years away.

How are our seniors and young families going to pay this bill? How does one keep up with the increases in fuel oil, gasoline, food and housing while still having enough money left over to pay such confiscatory taxes?

We are told by town leaders that millions of dollars more are necessary every year just to maintain level services. There never seems to be enough money to satisfy all the demands of our town government. More is NEVER enough.

We got to this sorry state by letting the “Merchants of Spending” take control of North Andover. Some of these Merchants are within our town government and some are on the outside continually pressuring officials to raise taxes in support of the spending habit.

On our Board of Selectmen, recently reelected Mark Caggiano has already called for a tax override to feed the spending beast that town government has become.

He is representative of the most dangerous kind of Merchant, those that have the power to put another tax increase proposal on the ballot and hope that the voters can be fooled into approving it.

Other Merchants on the board have supported numerous overrides in the past and we will have to wait and see if they are true to form in the coming months.

Almost as important are the School Committee Merchants of Spending. Current chairman Al Perry and former chairman Dan Murphy voted last June to spend millions of dollars on a new teachers contract that they knew the town could not afford. Their strategy was apparently to force the townspeople into a tax override to pay for it. What else could they have been thinking? Now that there is some resistance to a tax increase, they seem perplexed to learn that they may have to layoff 50-60 employees to pay for this expensive agreement.

At recent school committee meetings, both have been grilled by concerned citizens on how, in good conscience, they could have approved a contract with no prospect of the money being available. Not surprisingly, they were unable to offer rational answers.  Only School Committeeman Dr. Charles Ormsby and Selectman James Xenakis had the good sense to vote against this fiscal disaster.

 There are more Merchants of Spending on our Finance Committee. The current chair, Keith Mitchell, has never met a tax override he didn’t like and has actively campaigned in favor of the past several tax hikes.

The previous chair and current member, Jack Watkins, was the spokesman for the 2002 Financial Task Force that recommended a $10 million tax hike and tried to suppress a minority report disagreeing with the proposal. That recommendation would have increased real estate taxes by almost 23 percent if it had been adopted. That means approximately $1100 more would have been added to your current tax bill of $5500 and you would be facing another similar huge tax increase starting this July 1st.

The Merchants of Spending in the general population seem to come primarily from the school community. These advocates of spending don’t care where the money has to come from as long as they get what they want. It’s for the children, after all, or that’s what they want us to believe.

They seem unconcerned about the underlying details of why not enough money is available and believe that more money is the ONLY solution to all of our problems. This approach has been proven wrong repeatedly, but they are fixated and seem not to care. These people have no appreciation or sympathy for others in town struggling to keep up with skyrocketing tax bills.

Although the Merchants of Spending are all around us, and some are in positions of power, their numbers are still in the minority. This was obvious during the last two tax override elections, which were defeated by savvy voters with margins of more than 2 to 1. The people have spoken “loud and clear” that they don’t want their taxes increased. They want the town to live within its budget, just as families do.

Beware of the Merchants of Spending. Don’t believe them when they tell you that there is no alternative but to increase our taxes. Force them to manage the town within its budget and let us keep more of our hard-earned money. Let these Merchants know that their spending policies are out of touch with what we, the people, are willing to tolerate.

Ted Tripp is an International Consultant in high-tech manufacturing methods. He has BS and MS degrees in Chemical Engineering from MIT. You can reach him at tripp@gis.net.

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The April -2006 Edition of the Valley Patriot
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