An essential function of politics is making tradeoffs: What should a nation, state, or town pay for? How should the money be raised? Allocation of benefits and costs is more important when times are tight. Choices must be made among things that everyone values; taxpayers are particularly stretched. As needs increase, the ability to meet those needs diminishes. Harvard is a small town, and who pays and who benefits is clear. That’s good; democracy does best when voters are well-informed.
FinCom recommended an override of $107,000 to partially defray school athletic user fees. Who benefits? The 200 or so families whose kids pay such fees, on average by about $500 each. Who pays? All of us. Are varsity and junior varsity athletics a good thing? Certainly. Would it be better if Harvard had no school athletic user fees? Certainly. (And no fees for the transfer station or burn permits or the town beach, and free movies upstairs at Town Hall every month—with free popcorn—and a library that was open 69 hours a week, like Concord’s, and a whole bunch of other stuff, too.)
User fees are unfortunate, but reasonable, in these times: the people who get the benefits pay the costs. A mechanism already exists for families who cannot pay athletic user fees to have those costs covered; therefore, the people who would benefit from this override are those who can pay but would prefer not to.
The library has been pummeled by FinCom over a request for less than 15 percent of this override amount, and the library benefits every age and income group in town, not just a couple of hundred families whose kids play on competitive school teams. (The proposed override has nothing to do with the physical education program at Bromfield.)
I urge my fellow citizens to consider if FinCom reflects their priorities in these economic circumstances, to make their views known, and to vote.
Billy Salter
Elm Street
