On Wednesday night at 7:00 PM in the town meeting room located in the Meetinghouse Road building of BCTV, the Bedford Town Council will hold its second public hearing on the proposed 2014 town budget, on the proposed bond to build an additional fire station on South River Road, and on the proposed bond for road improvements.
The proposed 2014 town budget is $26, 284,180. The proposed bond for the additional fire station is $4 million. Obviously that does not include the hiring of additional people to staff it once built. The proposed bond issue is $30 million. At the town election, you will vote on each of these items separately.
What Bedford voters will decide is hard to predict given the current “sticker shock” many residents are now experiencing due to the huge tax hike we are going to have because of the usual blockbuster school budget. Unfortunately, town needs suffer greatly due to the school side of our tax bills. And unfortunately, even if the proposed school budget fails at the polls, the default school budget automatically kicks in, and it offers almost negligible savings to taxpayers. Criticize me if you will, but to my way of thinking, Bedford has become a town where the children are the only ones who count. Everything and everybody else is secondary.
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The Council wants to hear from residents. Will they instead hear little or nothing? That’s up to you. But remember, if you choose to always remain silent, you give up your right to help influence decisions that are made. And, you have no right whatsoever to then carry on endlessly after decisions are made that you don’t like when you made no effort to add to the beforehand dialogue. And that, my friends, is telling it like it is.
