Budget kudos

As our town struggles with a budget shortfall, it is worth recognizing those folks who have made an effort to close that gap...

Every department head was asked to make cuts, and they did. Unless you're at the top of the food chain mandating across the board cuts, slashing millions from the budget is not something that any one person can do. Everyone cut what they could, where they could, and in the end $2.2 million was saved. Most impressive.

Selectman Melissa Freitag gets two budget-related kudos:

1) Her insistence on a more thorough and transparent budget process is a breath of fresh air. Having already tried to add some fresh air to the budget process earlier this year, it is nice to know that someone else is willing to put this process under a microscope.

2) Ms. Freitag has also been a champion of basic common sense ways to save money, such as mandating double-sided copies. As she noted in a recent email to the Board, "When CCCC had its budget reduced 5% (instantly last fall), we put a freeze on single sides, and dramatically increased IT traffic. At a point soon thereafter, all were advised that in that short time (a month? two?) we had conserved one million sheets of paper."

Selectman Ahmed Mustafa upped Ms. Freitag's ante by suggesting that we dispense with copies altogether. Because our email is part of the record, and I'm not likely to do Mr. Mustafa's suggestion any justice by paraphrasing, I'll just share his recent email to our chair:

"It has come to my attention that we are 'bleeding' by making so many copies throughout the building and the budget is being put in jeopardy to about $800 a month, just at town hall. In the past I brought up using 'Kindles' as a way to save the paper flow, however we cannot afford to buy them now. We all have computers (notebooks or home units) therefore I would suggest that all the paperwork that we get be sent via email to us and we can read and print out what we need to take to the meetings, or do like I have done and buy a netbook for under $200 that you can use at meetings. I can also suggest that we also could supply 4g thumb drives to Carole and Diane that they could copy all this info to and put the finished product in our boxes. It can be accessed as you all know at your respective leisure via the USP ports. If we lead the way on this the other departments and committees will, I hope, follow suit. I only, once again, offer this suggestion as a way to help the town in our sudden fiscal downturn with more problems to come.

You and you alone are in control of our ship and we are about to scuttle the ship we are on, or we can salvage 'her' and set sail for the future in a renewed progressive step. This is just my opinion and I would suggest that an agenda item for the board be setup to discuss the merits or reasons why we should or should not stay this downward course.

Respectfully submitted; and there is no need for comment at this time, however if you should decide to make it an item we can discuss everything at a scheduled meeting on the pros and cons. Just my opinion to save some money and keep our employee(s) from losing their jobs."

To put Mr. Mustafa's suggestion into context, the IT department noted that the copier outside the selectmen's office printed 13,259 copies during one month. If we use that as a monthly average and estimate a cost of $0.05 each, we are spending nearly $8,000 a year in copies.