Efficiency?

I walked into the Budget Committee meeting a few minutes late and the presentation by the Efficiency Committee was already underway. I missed the opening, but it was clear that Bob Coffey had distributed his "Worst Case Tax Scenario", a document that seems intent on terrifying all homeowners. To give you an idea, one of the "Worst Case Scenario" items includes a $75 million new school with no state aid. I may have missed something at the start of the meeting, but where  this red herring came from is a mystery to me.

Here's what I understand based on my very limited participation in the Efficiency Committee and general attendance at meetings over the last several months: the Efficiency Committee has been spearheaded by Mr. Coffey, Mike LaBranche and Al Zink who sought to find "efficiencies" between the Town and School (hence the name.) They have expressed the desire to work together as a community rather than two separate entities so that we can identify our needs and do our best to plan for the future as a whole.

Sounds great.

Unfortunately, as Mr. Zink pointed out they didn't have the support of the community. Huh.

Let me point out a few things.

1. For a group that is about 2 elected bodies working together, shouldn't it be represented by both groups? Every time I encountered the Efficiency Committee, it was clearly being run by Mr. Zink, Mr. Coffey and Mr. LaBranche. Having an active School Board member would have been a good start to getting buy in from that segment of the community. 
2. You can't talk about working together and be accusatory at the same time. It just doesn't work. A lot of things were said without being said out loud and it was clear that the Efficiency Committee (read Mr. Coffey, Mr. Zink and Mr. LaBranche) thinks the School Board didn't do enough (even though it's supposedly a representative committee of both the Town and School. Or is it?)
3. Is it a failure just because it didn't work out the way you wanted it to or as quickly as you would have liked? I don't think so.

I see value in the pursuits of the Efficiency Committee, even if I don't see our future to be as dire as Mr. Coffey has described. I hope this group can accept that they have helped to start the process but they have a long way to go. Only collaboration will lead to true change.