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Editorial: What's wrong with this picture?
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Legislators at the county and town level run for election or re-election on the first Tuesday in November. On the first Wednesday or Thursday in November those same candidates often revise and always approve the following year's budgets for their municipalities. OK, in rare instances it's actually the following week, but that hardly impacts on our point. Shouldn't voters know how their elected representatives stood on the most important element affecting residents' taxes for the year to come before they cast their ballot for or against? Shouldn't we know beforehand how they really feel, as opposed to the hours of political rhetoric spewed during the campaign and tons of carefully crafted and always misleading trash we all get in the mailbox for weeks prior to Election Day.
Locally the Suffolk County Legislature always votes on the budget the day after the election — as this newspaper went to press they were voting on whether to raise your property taxes. Brookhaven and Huntington towns almost always vote two days after Election Day. The reason often given for voting then is the state mandated deadline for adopting the budget for the following year. But the state law does not prohibit the municipalities from approving their budgets earlier. In fact, Smithtown adopted their budget for 2010 on Oct. 29. Kudos to Smithtown.
Politicians are well aware of the electorate's famously short memory, and that vote to determine how — and how much — money extracted from taxpayers will be spent in the next year turns out to be in the neighborhood of 730 days before two-year termed officials will again stand before the voters. Pretty clever, eh?
And wrong. It's a long honored tradition in the few legislatures capable of planning ahead to impose the hard decisions on the budget approved two years out, and to soft-pedal the budget approved only a year before they stand for re-election. However you may view this practice we find it deceitful and disrespectful of the constituents these electeds claim to serve.
The time has come to insist our elected representatives be forced to vote on annual budgets before Election Day.
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Copyright 2010
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