The Mansfield, CT Parks and Recreation Ten Year Plan is a piece of work. Silicon Valley futurists speculate a few years from now, maybe to the border of 2030 and then ambiguously, with lots of hand-waving. I just realized that its something that was adopted about a year ago, is tucked away on a different website than than the town's page, and nobody seems to have know it existed until July2, 2025 when Mansfield mailed "news" about membership fees.
The phrase that sticks in the mind is "We also recognize the personal financial adjustment that may be required...". I'll bet you do.
You see. nowhere in any of the online discussions or literature is the idea that the first order of business would be to have institutionally financially adjusted the town's multi-million dollar budget to ensure that temporal spikes in spending needed to be tempered over time. But its too late for that now and, knowing Mansfield, this isn't a temporary spike in spending - this is a harbinger of debt to come.
On page 43 of the document, a conceptually moronic illustration of a stool is drawn as if it somehow meaningfully depicted an assurance that the town had a stable fiscal vision. I leave it to the reader to make sense of it.
I keep digging for clean data to make sense of Mansfield's accounting practice that should clearly define a dollar amount that can be mapped to a business expense that can be uniquely mapped to a functional responsibility.
For example, is the Public Works Department responsible for the custodial maintenance of all Mansfield public properties including the Mansfield Community Center (MCC)?
And isn't the MCC receptionists who handles A LOT of Mansfield Park & Recreation (P&R) communications P&R employees assigned to the MCC or MCC employees providing pro bono work for the town?
These are not small details when it has been suggested that membership rates should be increased just because accounting tricks are being used to shift Mansfield's self-inflicted fiscal obligations out to an unwitting and unsuspecting public. And we're not even talking about subverting the public's ability to apply low cost insurance toward the service.
On social media, Mansfield tax payers insist they OWN the MCC, the parks, the playgrounds, and so on. If that's the case then the daily operation and maintenance of all of it is a (proud) fiscal obligation of the Mansfield tax base to navigate and manage. Period. If *that* stuff is the reason that there's a cost deficit then that's not on the membership holder to bear.
Mansfield taxpayers who insist they don't use the MCC want to disown their obligation to pay for community assets. Some even absurdly insist that a non-taxpayer stepping into a public park is a freeloader. American values are being turned on their head by governmental malfeasance.
So far the puddle of incompetence that stool is sitting on includes:
- poorly or undefined MCC costs
- subversion of the legitimate exercise of applying insurance benefits (Is it a benefit if the government can cancel it?)
- negligence in educating and informing the public as to the purpose and scope of civic obligations
- promoting bigotry (age, class, ???)
The legs of that stool are equally nefarious. There is no accountability for the growth of the cost of services. None.
Mansfield taxpayers are imprinted to believe that the solution to fiscal problems is to find somebody/anybody to pay for them. There is no impulse to examine the cost and manage it. And the politicians are skilled at instrumenting actual costs into a whack-a-mole fool's errand.
There are no beneficiaries of service - there are only consumers who are willing to pay an honest price for an honest product. They aren't joining to pay off systemic mismanagement.
And when it comes to service categories, Silver Sneakers, et al are one of those categories.
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