Editorial

"Not Fooled By The Government"

Graph by Town of Gray-
'Per Capita Cost of Services'

"Not Fooled By The Government"...I saw that bumper sticker-saying while away on holiday last weekend, and bought it for my office.

On Saturday, citizens will congregate at Stimson Hall to vote at Town Meeting on their municipal budget. In preparation, the Town officials have been busy making a 7-page booklet chock full of information to hand out at Town Meeting to have while you are listening to debates on whether the budget should go up, down, or stay the same.

We scrutinized the material the Town generated, and have some questions as to certain elements of their presentation. Focusing on one of the several graphs in the handout, we’ll walk you through our concerns.

Math...The right hand bar shows that an estimated population for 2005 may be 7,850 (although that estimate does not keep with trends in the past twenty years, that’s one concern).

The Town shows that the estimated cost to deliver services will be $266. If
you multiply $266 times 7850, it results in a budget of a little over 2 million dollars. The proposed Municipal budget is over 5 million. Does that mean that there are three million dollars in the budget that the Council and Manager do not consider services? If not, what are they?

More math... In 1990 it shows that the Town’s delivery cost for services was $709. The next year shown, it was $402. How was that math arrived at? What happened to so dramatically reduce cost of service delivery? It makes us wonder if the same elements were used year to year for comparison.

Visual presentation...Graphs are a way of presenting information in visual format that is supposed to simplify and distill an idea. In the graph above, there are two elements. That is OK, as long as they are to the same scale. In the Town’s graph, though, population is shown as one bar, and dollar figures next to it as another bar. They are not to scale. Mathematically this results in an invalid presentation.

Our hope for you is that when you receive this information at Town meeting, look at it critically and discriminatingly. The Town did a good thing by preparing information for you to use while voting on the budget. But it’s important to ask questions, challenge the source information, and remember, you are “Not fooled by the government.”