At this point in the budget deliberations, it looks like the Cape Elizabeth Town Council’s goal of being able to disagree without being disagreeable may soon be put to the test.
    Without a budget an actual budget to debate, members of the council are already wrangling over what the bottom line number should be. It is a sometimes painful and awkward process to watch, because there are no villains to root against– there are no strident ideologues looking for any opportunity to shrink the local government down so that it can be drown in a bathtub nor are there any closet Wobblies forever dreaming up programs to lavish with other people’s money. Yet these seven reasonable people may soon find themselves on opposing sides of a zero-sum game: fund schools and punish financially vulnerable residents or provide tax relief and punish developmentally venerable children.
    Those councilors who took a pledge to limit spending on the local level say such a dichotomy is a red herring: quality schools and an austere spending philosophy can coexist as long as those in charge are willing to make hard decisions such as downsizing faculty and staff. They point out that there seems to be no relationship between per-pupil spending and performance. Cape students outperform virtually all others in the state even as per pupil spending lags every other school district.
    Those councilors who fret that the drive for efficiency has come at a heavy cost borne by students also reject an either/or mentality. They argue that to hold hostage the future of Cape’s children in the name of saving residents a few dollars makes no sense. They claim Cape school’s high performance is now running on fumes and is subsidized by the cumulative effect of individual parents’ high expectations and socio-economic resources.
    To some parents, the desire to withhold a couple hundred thousand dollars school administrators say they need to deliver a high-quality education is tantamount to scholastic infanticide (Anyone who considers using the phrase ‘scholastic infanticide’ hyperbolic, has never attended a Cape Elizabeth budget hearing).
    And so, in the coming months these seven reasonable people will listen to the hyperventilating on both sides– that they hate children or they hate elderly people. They pick and tweeze the budget, knowing that neither side is right; knowing that they love Cape Elizabeth and knowing that with rising costs and limited resources something has got to give. In the end they will end up with a budget most everyone can live with, even if its one nobody is particularly pleased with.
    And in the meantime, we can forgive them for getting a little irritable.
                         –Ward Peck