Gov. John Baldacci might have received the recent letters sent by the Waldo County Selectmen’s Association and the Belfast City Council, but has the governor really gotten the message? The latest draft of the governor’s proposed “competing measure” to the Maine Municipal Association’s tax reform and relief referendum suggests otherwise.

Although Baldacci appears to have backed away from the municipal service district idea, he still places the blame for out-of-control property taxes on municipalities. Now he’s proposing a “spending limit” on overall municipal appropriations. The joke is that for most of us town and city officials, the governor’s “limit” would actually represent a raise in our municipal property tax appropriation.

The governor is so out of touch that he doesn’t know towns like Troy have been operating under our own self-imposed spending caps for years to make up for the state’s declining contribution in the cost of K-12 education.

Lee Umphrey, the governor’s spokesman, said recently he was “surprised by the [angry and frustrated] tone of the letters” from the Waldo County Selectmen’s Association and the Belfast City Council (BDN, Aug. 11). Again, this is a clear sign that the governor and his staff are disconnected. We selectmen have to sit across the table from retired people and farmers trying to work out buy-back plans for their homes, which the town has taken for taxes because the state has failed to live up to its promise to pay for 55 percent of education costs. We need property tax relief and we need it now.

We need to pass the School Finance and Tax Reform Act of 2003, not a last-minute, cobbled-together competing measure that won’t address the real problems. Maine voters deserve the opportunity to vote, up or down, on the tax reform question already on the ballot, not to have the waters muddied by folks in Augusta who are clearly out of touch.

Jennifer Wixson

Troy