Staff Writer 

 Cape Elizabeth resident Fred Prince said watching the town’s municipal budget process made his “blood boil.”

“The town needs money, so what do you do? You cut out everybody’s favorite thing,” he said. “Why do you do that? To get a room full of people who say they’ll pay more taxes to keep their favorite thing.”

For Prince, “everybody’s favorite thing” is the Cape Elizabeth Dispatch service, which Town Manager Michael McGovern suggested – at a joint budget workshop with the town council and school board earlier this month – could be eliminated from next year’s municipal budget in order to save the town nearly $87,000. McGovern’s preliminary municipal budget proposal also includes canceling Family Fun Day in 2010, cutting the town’s facilities manager’s hours in half and closing the Recycling Center on Thursdays in an effort to identify $447,940 in savings meet a “flat” or zero percent increased municipal budget. 

“If you have two kids, as wife and husband, and you lose your jobs, you don’t shoot one of the kids,” Prince said. “You cut down on other areas.”

Prince was one of many residents, firefighters, police officers and rescue workers who spoke on behalf of keeping Cape Elizabeth’s local dispatch service instead of signing a contract with the county, a move resident and rescue worker Helen Mainville said could be “the difference between life and death.”

“To think we are cutting people and not things is a little hurtful,” Cape Elizabeth Police Detective Paul Fenton said. “The dispatch station is a beacon of hope and safety, to think that someone could go there for help and only find a telephone seems like something out of a horror movie. I believe there will be a safety issue if we regionalize dispatch.”

Resident Patrick Bobcock said he would support cuts in the school budget or community services in the municipal side of the budget if it meant the town could keep its local dispatch service.

“Last year the council approved putting in a bar and now they’re cutting dispatch, what kind of message is the council sending?” he asked “Are we supposed to police ourselves?”

As was reported by the Sentry Jan. 9, Town Council Chairman Jim Rowe said he would not support altering dispatcher’s contracts for another two years, as was promised by the council in early 2008.

 “These reductions are painful and will manifest in service reductions,” McGovern wrote in the proposal.

Although Superintendent Alan Hawkins has not yet presented a proposed school budget, the school board has advised him to prepare a budget with a 2 percent increase from last year, a number some residents said should be lower.

“Fewer than half of the town use the school services,” Barbara Schenkel, a resident who serves as planning board chariman, said. “The municipal part of the government shouldn’t have to absorb a majority of the cut. We all use the town services.”

Other residents suggested charging admission fees for non-residents at Fort Williams to help create new revenue for the town, an idea Fort Williams Advisory Commission member Greg Olsen said could help fund improvements to the park totaling more than $1.5 million.

“Let’s have fees at Fort Williams,” he said. “Let’s have revenue.”

The town council and school board were scheduled to discuss the input received at the public forum during a workshop earlier this week.