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The Martha's Vineyard Times is a weekly publication.
August 11 - 17, 2005 Edition
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Editorial The county question August 11, 2005 The county finance advisory board gave a good account of itself this week, approving a fiscal 2006 Dukes County budget that was nearly level funded, but rejecting, for the time being, further spending on the airport lawsuit, which the county just lost in spectacular fashion. It may be that a motion now before the court will reduce the county’s liability in this matter, a liability that approaches $900,000 at the moment. It may also be that the county commissioners will press to appeal the Superior Court ruling that, besides heaping huge costs on county taxpayers, indicts the whole sorry history of county decision-making. But, without a doubt, a broader challenge faces the advisory board, no matter how these issues are resolved. County manager E. Winn Davis often laments the Prop. 2.5 limit on the county’s ability to raise revenue from taxpayers. It’s the same limit that the towns face. But at the town level, spending increases beyond Prop. 2.5 limitations are decided firsthand by voters, line by line at town meeting. That is not the case with the county budget. Indeed, for taxpayers, Prop. 2.5 limits are indispensable, when confronted with a layer of government whose ambitions are as expansive and fanciful as those of the county commissioners and whose spending is imposed on the towns. In another offensive against their taxpaying constituents, the county commissioners often argue that their meddling in the day-to-day management of the county airport has only to do with their sense of responsibility to county taxpayers. What if the airport runs at a loss one year? Who’ll have to make it up? The taxpayers, that’s who. But in fact, the most notorious threats to Dukes County taxpayers are the Dukes County commissioners. They are the ones who’ve spent themselves and us into a hole with this unnecessary lawsuit. They are the ones who oversaw the airport — the most valuable county asset, by the way — in the mid-1990s, when its facilities, as documented by the Superior Court, were crumbling, when they failed to keep lease records or collect rents, and when the state and federal grantors who underwrite airport improvement demanded that the county commissioners step aside from airport management, or there wouldn’t be any federal or state money coming. If Island taxpayers are looking for a bulwark against mismanagement, political overreaching, and financial chaos, the Dukes County commissioners aren’t it. And anyway, as Times reporter Ezra Blair makes clear this week in his account of the advisory board meeting, the Registry of Deeds, the sheriff’s office, the office of the county treasurer, and the Martha’s Vineyard Airport are not under the direct control of the county or its manager. In particular, with regard to the airport, state and federal regulations do not allow money from the airport to be diverted to non-airport, county uses. So, the four most significant county departments that account for approximately 78 percent of the county’s budget are not subject to strict county control. You may ask, then, what does the county do that we need it to do? And you’ve asked the right question. Indeed, it is the question the finance advisory board members, each of them a selectman representative from one of the six Vineyard towns, must ask, and answer. That’s the broader question.

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