A memo this week from the Maine Municipal Association speaks of anger fast becoming rage. MMA, you’ll recall, was the group last June that brought voters Question 1 and the promise of substantially lower property taxes. Yet instead of enjoying the fruits of its victory it finds itself pleading once again with a legislative committee to drop the property tax rate sharply and immediately, as described in its successful referendum.

How could the committee not follow the outcome of the June vote? Or as the MMA memo presents dramatically, “Without apparent effect, the committee has been reminded that the wording of the question the voters approved on June 8th was: ‘Do you want the State to pay 55 percent of the cost of public education, including all special education, for the purpose of shifting costs from the property tax to State resources?’ Without apparent effect, the committee has been reminded that the law adopted by the voters on June 8th prohibited the Legislature from meeting its financial responsibilities established by Question 1A through reductions in historical distribution of state subsidy, expressly including both the homestead exemption and the revenue sharing program.”

The memo goes on from there but you need not – the answer to how the June referendum came to be regarded lightly was given before the referendum took place, at the end of the legislative session in April, when representatives from the governor’s office, legislators and MMA officials tried to find a reform they could all agree on. MMA, for reasons that were hard to understand, supported compromise proposals that would delay the property-tax cuts for as much as four years.

This was, of course, before the association could know the outcome of the June vote, but from a negotiating position the support was an extremely risky decision. It told legislators that a proposal far more mild than the June question was acceptable to the question’s chief backers.

Anyone could rightly argue that the June vote was an expression of the public, not merely a position by the municipalities’ lobbying arm, but the association had been the foremost group on this question for so long that it effectively led all supporting voters on it. And now it has led them back to the state capitol, which is approximately where it was eight months ago, only it appears before lawmakers this time having disarmed its own most potent weapon.