Monthly Archives: March 2009

I Said a Dirty Word

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Suzi gave me grief this morning even before anybody in the family could. Suzi and her husband Sam own the general store and bait shop here in North Puffin. When they aren’t behind the counter, their assistant Mark waits on customers. Suzi was right and wrong to chastise me but mostly right. See, last Sunday, the Burlington Free Press delivered just 4 papers to the store and I didn’t get one.

I said a dirty word. Out loud. In fact I probably said, “Those ****ers” when Mark gave me the bad news.

Suzi called me on it this morning when I asked her to hold a paper for us. “You weren’t very polite to Mark,” she said. “You should not have cursed at him.”

I’ve been known to miss out on a paper there because I was late arising on a Sunday morning but that’s my own fault. It irks me when the news conglomerate doesn’t hold up their end of the deal despite my long experience with that company.

We used to get the Sunday paper delivered at home. I like everything about home delivery here in North Puffin except the price, the business model, and the paper itself.

The paper itself, self-titled “Vermont’s newspaper,” is less than ideal especially when compared to other papers around the country. The Miami Herald, for example, is a real newspaper. The Sunday Burlington Free Press, with just 32 pages in the four editorial sections, has less than a quarter of the Sunday Herald‘s content.

The Free Press business model is borrowed from the phone company. That means it ain’t free. My primary complaint, year in and year out, has been that they cheat on the bill. They bill for papers not delivered, apologize, promise to fix the problem, and bill for papers not delivered.

The price is ridiculous. There is no excuse for a local paper to charge more than a national paper. The Free Press charges $1.75 on Sunday plus an extra half a buck for home delivery, week in and week out. The Herald delivers each Sunday edition and the Florida Keynoter twice weekly (that’s three separate papers and three separate deliveries) for a little more than half of that. The three papers and three deliveries add up to one or two more than 32 pages, too.

If you wonder why I keep rewarding this outfit for such lousy behavior, the answer is simple. They are the only Sunday paper with any Vermont coverage in this part of the state. They publish a local toob guide. And they have the grocery store fliers.

All that is true but it’s no excuse for what I said when the store had no papers. Mark thought I was talking about him.

I hate it when that happens.

When I apologized this morning, Suzi admitted that she hates the Freep, too.

My first response to her might normally have been, Hey, deal with it, but Mark is truly a sweet and caring young man who probably really did think I was mad at him for the Freep‘s screwup.

This is not about Mark. It’s about the Free Press (those ****ers) and my need to spread more joy in spite of them.

Cheers.

Centrally Planned Waste

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Vermont was an independent nation before the liberals and hippies found us. One cornerstone of our independence is an entrenched disbelief in representative governance. We citizens of the towns and gores of rural America would get together in our community’s largest building and shout at each other until a consensus was reached over whether to dig a long slit trench behind the livery stable or if we should require each house on Main Street to install its own cesspool. This was the first example of Centrally Planned Waste.

Oh.

I see.

I guess we were supposed to talk about budgets.

Tomorrow (Tuesday, March 2) most Vermont townships will hold Town Meeting.

The Vermont Secretary of State gives this history of the event. “The first town meeting in America was in Massachusetts in 1633, but the practice of direct democracy dates back to around 400 B.C. in Athens of ancient Greece. Unlike town meetings today, in ancient Greece women, children and slaves could not vote, and meetings required the presence of at least 6,000 citizens!

“Vermont town meeting is a tradition dating back to before there was a Vermont. The first town meeting was held in Bennington in 1762, 15 years before Vermont was created” and 29 years before this tiny nation joined the union of states.

“In the late 1700s, as today, town citizens in Vermont held meetings so that they could address the problems and issues they faced collectively. Popular matters of legislation in earlier town meetings included whether or not to let pigs run free or whether smallpox vaccinations should be allowed in the town (some thought vaccinations were dangerous). Voters also decided what goods or labor could be used as payment for taxes.”

Town Meeting is a holiday for state government employees.

I served as a School Moderator at town meeting for more than a decade here. The moderator’s job is to keep the meeting orderly, calls for votes, keep the meeting orderly, and announce the decisions of the voters. And keep the meeting orderly. The real test comes when the moderator needs to interpret amendments, to govern how the discussion (and votes) proceed, and to count “ayes.” I think the Town asked me to step into the position because it would limit how much I could talk from the floor.

Vermonters can be … muddle headed … at Town Meeting. Last year in Brattleboro, residents voted on whether to arrest President Bush and Vice President Cheney for war crimes and more. This year state and local advocates for big gummint will have their hands out at every Town Meeting. “Now more than ever, we need more money and more people for programs,” they will say. Every warning has requests for increased staffing and more money.

Sounds like centrally planned waste to me.

No matter what goes on at Town Meeting, it is crucial to be there. We’re not the only family in North Puffin with our “full time” hours or wages cut. We’re making do with less. I encourage our towns and schools to do the same.

I just hope we won’t all have to BORROW MONEY TO PAY OUR PROPERTY TAXES.

Town Meeting is chance for all of us to weigh in, to be heard, and to make decisions. That doesn’t happen in Montpelier. Or Washington.

A Tax Primer

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18th Century Americans counted their land as wealth, so the towns that grew up from the farms here taxed the value of the real property our citizens owned. As the recent bobbles in the real estate market have proven, land is perhaps not the best indicator of one’s ability to pay for civic service. Few citizens today measure wealth by land holdings. Today we live on wages and interest and dividends, the proceeds of manufacturing and trade.

The property we bought in North Puffin more than 30 years ago serves as a good example. This Town reappraised all properties last year so everyone’s assessment rose a skazillion percent. Sales prices of real estate are down by half here now but the appraisal is still high. My wife who, like so many other American workers had her “full time” job cut to just three days per week, is suddenly “land poor.” The taxing authorities here believe she can pay higher real estate taxes again this year simply because she did it last year.

Vermont’s most fundamental source of revenue (other than the Federal government) is real estate taxes. Unlike in Florida, real estate tax revenue here never declines simply because property values do.

That, dear reader, is a fundamental problem.