Bangor’s budget

Like nervous high-wire acrobats teetering above the crowd, the Bangor City Council is moving cautiously on the 1991 municipal budget, inching along, tensed for a catcall from some constituent who might shake the nine troupers and their budget, sending the whole package tumbling to the ground.

It is unfortunate that in a year when every municipality in Maine is under extreme fiscal stress because of the revenue shortfalls at the state level, that Bangor’s Council is tempted to approach the municipal budget in a defensive and arbitrary manner.

Adding up the numbers from last year, crunching in new debt service, already negotiated wage increases and the impact of inflation, the city would have to spend 6 percent more this year than last just to maintain the status quo. The municipal and school department sides of the budget, with reduced state assistance and lower non-tax revenues factored in, collectively add up to a substantial 11 percent increase in local taxes, a figure typical of other Maine communities that are trying to hold the line on municipal services and education programs while absorbing the impact of decreased revenues.

Bangor is faced with two choices:

The Council can take the cheap and easy way out politically by drawing an arbitrary line through the budget. Councilors can appear tough by adhering to an artificial limit on spending and thereby ignore community needs, demands for local programs, and the appearance, educational quality and morale in the city. A few people will applaud that shortsighted action today, but everyone will suffer later if deferred maintenance on parks, buildings and playgrounds and a decreased effort to address the needs of children and the helpless now only creates a more expensive problem later.

There is an alternative. The Council can bite the political bullet, as has been done in some communities. Assuming that their city already is run responsibly and economically, finding the budget reasonably lean, and understanding that the public wants and expects the existing level of services and educational quality, the councilors could accept their roles as leaders in tough times, make limited and prudent cuts in the budget and ask taxpayers to accept the inevitable increase.

There may be a handful of chronically angry and dissatisfied residents who will chafe in an unusual, one-time increase in taxes, but the overwhelming majority of Bangor people, the taxpayers and voters who soundly defeated an arbitrary spending cap two years ago, surely will not blame the Council for doing what is right.