SHOW WHERE MONEY GOES

For motivation, nothing works like the threat of a crisis. Towns statewide have organized themselves as never before to persuade voters to reject the proposed 1 percent tax cap on the Nov. 2 ballot. They have warned of danger and doom, of reduced emergency services and cancelled high-school football. They have also offered something positive: resolves that pledge to use at least 90 percent of the additional state tax money from the June 8 referendum to lower property taxes. But they could do even more and it wouldn’t cost them much.

The June referendum asked voters whether they want the state to pay 55 percent of the cost of public education, thereby shifting costs from the property tax to state taxes. Voters said yes, despite intense opposition from Augusta. Barely discussed at the time was that towns that are rich in property and potentially high in property taxes would also be low receivers for state school aid, so wouldn’t see much of a shift. That means the resolves to use the referendum money against local taxes won’t mean much to them.

Still, the resolve, begun in Brewer, has won support in 110 cities and towns, representing 614,000 residents, an encouraging sign. But some towns promising to use some money to lower mill rates by some amount is not entirely persuasive. This isn’t to blame the resolves – they are as specific as the uncertainty in the state budget process allows.

The tax cap is popular for lots of reasons; one of them is the suspicion by taxpayers that their money is not being spent efficiently. Any town in Maine would profit from school and municipal leaders demonstrating regularly, and not just at budget time, that they are watching the public purse carefully.

A statewide campaign of towns showing how the choices they make about where and how to spend that money would be reassuring and instructive. At the least, it would remove the mystery between putting millions of tax dollars into one end of government and seeing services come out the other.

Schools, for instance, scrimp on supplies (teachers often buy them with their own money), cut training budgets and add extracurricular chores to teaching duties to stay within a budget. Does the public know this? Towns can be equally parsimonious. Just as certainly, opening up local budgets this way will expose waste and inefficiency, but that too is worth the risk if it leads to more effective government.

National surveys repeatedly have shown that Maine residents get good value for their tax dollars. If there was ever a time to offer specifics to a doubting public, this is it.