"Police officers put the badge on every morning, not knowing for sure if they'll come home at night to take it off."
~Tom Cotton

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Exaggerations, car salesmen and tax overrides

If it's one thing that annoys me, it's the person who resorts to gross exaggerations to make a point. A letter in the Tuesday, May 8, Falmouth Enterprise suggested that raw sewage is going to flow into our harbors and beaches and there will be thousands of health related issues if Question 2 (the New Silver Beach debt exclusion) fails to pass.

Hogwash.

As noted in my other post Nitrogen vs. Sewage (also a letter in the Enterprise), there are no public beaches or businesses open to the public in New Silver Beach. Moreover, the project is going to move forward with or without the override, so these dire predictions will NEVER come to pass.

This reminds me of the cranberry bog issue. In case you don't remember, we were told that pesticides were being "dumped into the river" (no one ever found any evidence that any pesticides were getting into the river), and that such a "significant" amount of nitrogen was being contributed to our estuaries that we needed to close the bogs (there would be no measurable difference in the nitrogen even if every cranberry bog were closed).

Needless to say, such exaggerated claims helped contribute to the current fiasco.

Fortunately, New Silver Beach is, for all intents and purposes, definitively resolved. The question about funding is a side show - albeit a serious one for those on both sides of the issue who cannot afford it.

On the one hand, the homeowners in New Silver Beach have some serious costs involved with this. However, they did buy those homes in the first place.

On the other, every tax increase - no matter how small - is a serious thing to those folks (seniors especially) who are already living paycheck to paycheck. Indeed, whenever our selectmen tell us that an override will "only" cost so many dollars a year, I'm reminded of car salesmen. You know...the ones who say that we can drive the car off the lot for "only" so much a month. Only later do we find out that we're paying more in interest than for the actual car.

Am I exaggerating?

We CAN do better!

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