This started out as a post for social media. Once I started writing, I quickly realized I had more thoughts that I wanted to share than made sense for a post. No surprises there!
I am not running for reelection on Branford’s RTM this year. After two two-year terms, I feel that I’ve done a decent amount of service to the town, and fulfilled my responsibilities as a citizen and civic-minded individual. It’s been a great experience, and between chairing the Public Services committee and serving as clerk for Rules and Ordinances, I’ve learned a lot about how a Connecticut town functions and why. Here are some of the thoughts, conclusions, and observations I’ve made during that time.
First: very few people know much about local politics, even though it’s the level over which one has the most control. A middle-class Connecticut resident probably pays 30-40% of their total tax bill in property taxes, which are what fund local government and services. Rates of participation for most initiatives are vanishingly small. As a result, individuals and small groups have an incredible ability to impact legislation and votes. Case in point: the RTM voted to approve $7 million for artificial turf fields because a half dozen parents showed up at a meeting. The town hastily voted to sped $7 million on fields that are practically guaranteed to injure more kids who play on them! And if you don’t like science, ask someone who stakes their livelihood on rigorously maintaining good health. I was leaning against supporting the measure, but the passion of the parents changed my mind. A small minority wanted these fields very much. I mention this not to express regret at my vote, but to share how a group of vocal minority showing up absolutely impacted a consequential vote.
Second: Local politicians tend not to have training or experience. Branford’s RTM is comprised of unpaid volunteers, with two exceptions: the RTM’s moderator, which is paid a very modest stipend, and the RTM’s clerk, which is paid an even more modest stipend; hundreds of dollars per year. Very reasonable for part-time work which is demanding and important.
To get 28 people in a town of 28,000 to show up monthly and do hours of work each week besides on committees and in one’s own district for no money testifies to the importance of democratic representation in New England. In one form or another it has been our way for nearly four centuries. Far more, if one believes that our ways were imported and adapted from English and Scandinavian forms of government as is the argument advanced by David Hackett Fischer in Albion’s Seed. Isn’t that remarkable!
There are always pressures brought to bear against volunteerism, by people who want or need to be paid for their time, and by people who feel that paying for labor results in higher quality labor. Having sat inside the RTM for four years, at this point, I feel strongly that our ways ought to be preserved as is; there is no argument for professionalizing government beyond an absolute minimum that outweighs to me the arguments against it.
Third: Ordinances. Rules and laws passed by the town to enforce proper behavior. All the time, I see on Facebook folks posting about the importance of their rights and liberties, and how tyrannical it is that they be taxed to do a thing they want to do. If Vermont puts a $25 tax on campers to stay overnight at a state park (I don’t know if they do), that’s tyranny. If New York City requires $750 for a pistol permit (I don’t know if they do, I’m making that number up), that’s a tyrannical tax.
But the way a town sees this sort of tax or fee isn’t as a revenue-generation mechanism. The way the people drafting the ordinances isn’t to raise money, either. The reason the fees are so low is that the purpose of ordinances and laws are to encourage those thoughtless or disrespectful people whose actions disrupt their town or neighborhood’s peace and harmony to respect it, and, if that encouragement fails, to offer the town and neighborhood a mechanism for correcting thoughtless or disrespectful behavior.
When framed as a question of rights, anyone who isn’t familiar with the important specific context of the ordinance will probably think selfishly about how important their rights are. Rights are important! Tyranny is bad! That same person, when living next door to a person who has an improperly zoned mechanic shop in their back yard and loudly revs car engines at 10pm on a work night may abruptly become interested in constraining their neighbor’s rights slightly, in exchange for quality sleep. One doesn’t buy a home in a residential neighborhood thinking you’ll be living next to a body shop, and when your neighbor turns out to be that one-in-a-hundred sociopaths who simply does not care about others, or about obeying the rules — because of his “rights” and “liberty” — you’ll be grateful ordinances exist.
Fourth: The limits of law enforcement. Ordinances on the books are one thing. Getting overworked police departments to enforce ordinances is another. Particularly in small towns, noise is a constant issue. In Branford, there is a tension between expensive riverfront condominiums enjoyed by retirees, and the Stony Creek Brewery, an establishment that breaks even (barely) by holding noisy concerts and events late into the night. The Branford PD is often at capacity and unable to respond to reports like these. [note: the SCB has since been bought by the New England Brewing Company (NEBCO) and hopes are high among citizens that this will mean a change in how that space is used, though I remain skeptical]
This gets back to the tension between volunteerism and professionalism I mentioned in my second point. For hundreds of years, Branford (like most New England towns) relied for its law enforcement on volunteer constables who were elected. By the 1920s a variety of factors meant that policing by constables was no longer suitable, and Branford (also like most New England towns) employed a full time police department made up of professional officers. Since then it has become decreasingly possible to mobilize citizens for law enforcement or law enforcement adjacent work; state-level ordinances, rules, and credentialing make policing a very difficult field to move into with volunteers.
This trend can also be seen in America’s approach to a full time professional military (active duty went to this model after Vietnam) and the ongoing transition from volunteer to full-time fire departments. Systems that started out as made up of citizens volunteering their time for important roles morph, over time, into systems dependent on full-time professional employees.
The problem that one runs into on a local level is: you can only afford so much. Taxes in Connecticut are notoriously high, in part because — well — New England has been part of the U.S. longer than most other regions, and it has always taxed citizens at higher rates, for more services. That’s what you sign up for when you settle and make a life in New England. High taxes, robust services. To hire more police to handle more ordinance violations, you’d need to hire more officers. And the appetite to raise taxes higher (each officer comes with a lifetime training, salary, retirement and benefits obligation to taxpayer of millions of dollars) is nonexistent.
Financially, I believe our town (and maybe our state!) are near the limits of what we can afford through progressive taxation. Particularly given falling rebates from a federal government that is overtly hostile to the New England way of life, I believe that it is time to *de-professionalize* and to emphasize volunteer roles for certain ordinance enforcement. A local constabulary could easily accomplish this role. In fact, that’s precisely what it did for the 230 or so years before Branford (and towns like it) opted for a full-time police department. One doesn’t hear about civilization collapsing into lawlessness in Connecticut between 1789 and 1920 without a professional police force because that never happened.
I think we collectively need to have a conversation about ways to spend less money for more services, and that means mobilizing volunteer networks. Professionalization is almost always the best way to provide services to a town, but it’s also the most expensive. At a certain point we’ll run into that reality.
Fifth: Partisanship. In voting terms, you see that play out with straight-party votes. Behind closed doors, though, in caucus, there’s a lot of nuance.
The decision to pass the budget with RTM interference in the administration and Board of Finance’s recommendations — essentially using the RTM’s power to force BoF and the Selectmen to spend more out of the undesignated fund — was the product of a lot of wrangling. On the Democratic side, some wanted the town to spend more from its undesignated fund. Everyone was onboard with the town offsetting tax increases — the question was how much, not whether to do it or not. I wrote about the process here.
Partisanship, though, is when you see people fabricate arguments to support their position, rather than using their position to develop arguments. Modern politics is driven as much by partisanship as anything else. And one of the things I’ve learned inside the process is that partisanship develops its own logic. It is what The Great founder George Washington meant when he warned against factionalism. There are people on the Republican side who cannot ever accommodate Democrats, and people on the Democratic side who cannot ever accommodate Republicans. Friends, if you never see any merit to what the other side is saying, if you find yourself constantly arguing one side of a dispute, you’ve become a partisan. The problem is you!
Conclusion: there’s incredible power and potential at the local level. Knowing how the town government runs as an abstraction and being inside it are two extremely different things. This, local government, is where our ancestors put the bulk of their efforts — not the state or federal government — and there was a reason for that investment. They believed in the spiritual and moral utility of a certain kind of work, the Puritans who put this all together (at least, in the Connecticut and New Haven colonies, which eventually became our state, and those of other New England colonies). Whether you tend to agree with them or disagree, I’ve come to see great wisdom in the way they organized their social and political lives to work alongside their professional lives. They hoped that in organizing their private lives a certain way, they would create virtuous and harmonious organization of their public lives — and that organization would move upward in a useful and natural way, such that governors and (ultimately) presidents would be of that modest, thrifty, and unostentatiously prosperous fiber.
It worked! The Ivy League consists of some the best colleges in the world! It still educates the lawyers and judiciary and professional politicians that have kept our country humming along for centuries! That we have in recent decades turned our backs on the wise and moderate teachings of our ancestors does not in any way diminish their success.
Misreadings, misunderstandings (both deliberate and ignorant) and misuse have all conspired to bastardize what it means to be a New Englander. It’s not difficult to see what I mean by that on Instagram and TikTok if you’re still on either platform (I am not). This is not, as far as I can tell, a recent phenomenon; it’s decades old. As big cities and the American West have lost their allure for hucksters and get-rich-quick schemers, more and more people have brought this distinctly unpuritanical (if not outright unAmerican) idea of hedonistic prosperity for its own sake — the accumulation of wealth as a good unto itself, rather than as a means to an end. This has been to the detriment of Connecticut and Branford, and New England states and towns everywhere.
Here is my feeling: at some point our culture — local, regional — will have to fight back against the corrupting and decadent influence of excess; it will have to reclaim as our birthright a boring, hardworking, and spartan way of life and way of living for which the people who built this state became famous. It is possible to do that in one’s home. To a limited extent it’s possible to put energy and effort into accomplishing that at the town level. Much depends on that project. I hope we’ll figure it out before it’s too late.
The Local Blind Spot 