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The
Martha's Vineyard Times is a weekly publication.
July 21 - July 27, 2005 Edition
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Editorial
But, up close
July 21, 2005
From a distance, Martha’s Vineyard is a puzzle. It’s
small, insular, and the playground of the rich and famous. A ghastly
notion. But, up close, it is also poorer than it seems, staggeringly
expensive to live in, maybe impossibly expensive for all but the
wealthy. From a distance, it is a well defended quasi-paradise,
with clean water and strict development controls. But, up close,
it is built on a narrow economic base whose largest contributors
are transfer payments to the retired and real estate sales and housing
construction and maintenance, founded on inflating land values.
From a distance, Islanders, seasonal and year-round, benefit from
a broad array of social services and quasi-public institutions,
each generous in its menu of good work. Up close, nearly every non-profit
enterprise — in health care, social service, artistic, historic,
conservation, preservation — is in perpetual or episodic financial
distress, even as the need for all these services increases with
the growth in the year-round and seasonal populations. None of these
core organizations has all the money it needs to do all the things
it ought to be doing.
From a distance, the Vineyard is littered with new or nearly new
schools, some with declining populations and expanding budgets,
for fewer than 2,500 children. But up close, the economy is so badly
in need of labor that it must be imported, either for the short-term
as immigrants who are poorly housed, poorly paid, and who often
live at the margins of the community. Or we bring in workers daily
from more affordable mainland communities.
In simple terms, the six Island towns have settled on a dependable
way to finance annual municipal budgets. We get 60 percent or more
of what we need from part-time residents who require and get little
in the way of expensive services. Year-round property owners pay
40 cents on the dollar or less for municipal services. For the benefits
showered on us by private non-profits, we year-rounders pay even
less. Seasonal residents carry the ball for the non-profits too.
It’s almost a free ride. And, up close, the topper is that
we cherish the right to belly ache about how annoying the visitors
and summer residents are, even as we slide the tab across the table
for them to pay.
So, it is amazing that we find ourselves in the middle of a fundraising
and non-profit building boom. Consider that the Martha’s Vineyard
Hospital is half way to $42 million for a new building to replace
its worn-out 1974 model. The Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society
has spectacular plans to move from its cramped, inadequate longtime
Edgartown headquarters to a new building in West Tisbury. More than
$10 million will be needed. The Y, whose supporters will soon announce
they’ve hired an architect to design the new multi-purpose
community center with pool and fitness and teen center and elder
center facilities that they believe the community has said it wants,
will need more than $10 million too. Apparently, there’s no
shortage of the right stuff when bricks and mortar are wanted.
But, up close, the lesson of the last 35 years, as the Island year-round
population has more than doubled and grown richer along the way,
is that even the most extravagantly capitalized and badly needed
non-profits have struggled year in and year out to meet the financial
requirements of current operations and expanding need. All the important
non-profits, from the hospital to Martha’s Vineyard Community
Services to the visiting nurse services, to, well, you name it,
have contended with rising demand for their services and undependable,
or at least variable, sources of income to pay for those services.
Why should it be any different going forward for the big non-profits
that are planning expensive expansions or new construction, or for
the smaller organizations that scrape by each year on a summer filled
with silent auctions and benefit dinners? Are we at some unexpected
watershed when demand will level off and revenue will miraculously
materialize as needed? Hardly. So, we need to think this through
carefully.
As the Vineyard considers these substantial and exciting new plans,
it is the case that raising the money to build may not be the big
challenge. The chief concern is how to properly finance and coordinate
the ongoing operations of these enlarged enterprises, as well as
the work of the smaller, bedrock non-profits on which we depend
so heavily. Are the plans that are emerging in this frothy summer
fundraising season of a scale that is supportable going forward?
What will their influence be on others in the non-profit community,
and on the hard working members of the private business community,
whose services we also need and value? Does the community as a whole
have a responsibility to commit itself to public funding for part
of the ongoing operations of some of these needed services? How
could a public-private structure be devised that would give the
Island community a way to influence the quality and nature of valuable
community services that are not undertaken by municipal or county
government and regulate the flow of public funding to these providers?
And, first things first, where is the forum to consider such questions?
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