Too Little, Too Late?

The Board of Finance of the Town of New Fairfield, CT reviewed the budgets of the town and the school system, and then reduced the size of the budget increase year-to-year (2007/08 – 2008/09) to 3.41% by asking the Board of Selectmen and the Board of Education to reduce their budgets by some amount that started at $1.8 million but turned out to be a little less, given that the BOF also was able to make some reductions of its own in the amounts they put into medical insurance and the capital and non-recurring fund.

That 3.41% hits your wallet as an increase to property taxes. Because of it, you will have to pay a little bit more. How much? Let’s say you have a house that is assessed at $350,000 (that’s 70% of it’s actual price). You’ll owe a total of $7224 in taxes next year. That’s a lot of money.

That’s $238 more than you owed the year before ($6986). You’ve got to come up with that much more money to pay your taxes this year.

Put that way, it doesn’t sound like a lot. It works out to $19.83 a month. (Total taxes due each month are $602.)

The trouble is, everything else besides your taxes is going up. Fuel and food prices are going up a lot faster than your taxes. Fuel and food costs are out of control – the BOE or town budgets are not.

Let’s say every day you leave that house assessed at $350,000 and go to work 25 miles away. That’s a round trip of 50 miles, made 5 times a week. Your car gets 25 MPG, so you use 10 gallons a week, or roughly 40 gallons a month.

If the price of a gallon of gas is $1 higher this year than it was a year ago that means you’re spending $40 more each month for gas, just to get to work. That’s more than twice as much as the amount of extra property taxes you’re going to have to pay next year.

Your commute is costing you about $1920 per year, or 26% of your annual property tax bill, in fuel alone. It’s getting worse. Last year, your commute was 21% of your annual property taxes.

That’s not all. We have a food industry that is very dependent on oil. That makes it very susceptible to the increase in the price of oil. Farming is oil-intensive, and shipping food from farms or processing plants a long distance away is also oil-intensive. Add in the millions of acres of farmland that has been diverted into growing corn destined for conversion into ethanol to put into our gas tanks, and you get the price pressure that you’re seeing on our food supply, as well as the possibility of food shortages. Food shortages are a comfortable way of saying that people around the world and even in the United States are going to face the threat of starvation. But at first this means that food becomes more expensive.

Sure enough, we have seen food prices rise alongside and because of the rise in the price of oil. And we have seen shortages, even in this country, as Costco and Wal-Mart limit the amount of rice and flour that any customer can purchase.

The price of oil is going to keep going up, because there is a limit to how much oil can be pulled out of the ground, and we hit that limit about two years ago. But there is no limit to how much oil we need, not as long as there are more of us every day, and not as long as countries like India and China continue to pick up our bad habits, like our short-sighted love affair with automobiles and the personal mobility and independence they provide.

Automobiles allow us to live far apart from each other and far from places where we work or get the things we need. No, not flat panel television sets. Food. Basic necessities like bread and meat. Milk, cheese, eggs. Juice, fruit, and vegetables. Rice and flour.

Life in Suburbia is getting expensive, and it’s not the property taxes that are the real threat. We depend on that supermarket in the center of town to be well supplied. If for any reason (a trucker strike over the price of fuel, a breakdown in the flow of oil to this country) that supermarket is not stocked, it will be empty less than a week. If it were to stay empty for more than a week, many households would be exhausting the last interesting cans of food that they’ve forgotten on the top shelf of the pantry. Things that might no longer be edible. Fortunately, the government is ready with an answer.

For a while now, the government has been recommending that families prepare for a pandemic flu outbreak. You can read about the preparations the government says your household should take at http://pandemicflu.gov/plan/individual/familyguide.html.

The Government wants you to plan and be prepared for a pandemic, and it makes sense to do so.

A pandemic flu outbreak could force a community to be quarantined for a period of two weeks or more. That could disrupt food supply, and leave you in your home. Essential services like electricity could be disrupted, too. These happen to be the same conditions you would face in the event of a disruption to fuel supply.

The steps you take for the possibility of a pandemic flu outbreak could help your family survive other disasters.

Of course, disasters can last longer than two weeks. They also don’t have to happen at all.

In the face of this or any other possible disaster, the only course of action that will guarantee failure is to do nothing.

This does put property taxes in their right place, as something small, compared to some of the big issues we face as individuals, families, and a nation.

And maybe it puts into perspective all the argument over whether or not we’ll build permanent restrooms, or continue to rely on port-o-sans at our town’s athletic fields and playground. We need those restrooms, whether or not they could prevent a future pandemic.

What I’d like to see more than anything else around town are windmills and solar panels. Also, more lawns turned into victory gardens.

It would also be nice to know that more households are taking the government’s pandemic flu recommendations seriously, and stocking up for any type of disaster.