Budget referendum process criticized

Official: Government cannot erode citizens’ rights

EAST HAMPTON — The general government budget was sent to referendum without a vote.

During a sparsely attended town meeting Monday, the issue was scheduled for a daylong June 12 referendum without the usual vote to do so. That led people on both sides of the divide — members of the Town Council/town government and residents opposed to the budget — each to claim the other side was seeking to block their right to vote.

The $15.1 million budget, the town’s share of the two-part budget (the other being education), was defeated at the initial budget referendum May 15 by a three-vote margin.

The $30.5 million education portion of the budget, subject of much often passionate debate, passed overwhelmingly. A number of pro-education supporters said they had voted to reject the town budget to protest the reduction made in the proposed school budget increase.

The Board of Education had presented a proposed education budget that called for a 3.73 percent increase over the current year’s spending. However, the Republican majority on the Board of Finance cut that back to 1.5 percent — a reduction of $670,000 in the proposed increase.

That ignited the passions of any number of education supporters who demanded the money be restored. The issue was further complicated when the General Assembly voted a week before the initial referendum to restore $700,000 in Education Cost Sharing funds to the town.

Pro-education supporters insisted the Town Council and Board of Finance pledge to allocate that money to the education budget. However, following a mandated recount required by the closeness of the vote, the council voted to allocate a majority of a nearly $700,000 state grant to reduce the tax rate for the coming year.

Nearly two dozen people attended Monday night’s town meeting.

Amid a swirl of rumors that they might try to vote down the revised budget, Town Manager Michael Maniscalco sought an attorney’s opinion on whether a vote was required to send the budget to referendum.

A response from attorney Richard D. Carella was emailed to Maniscalco at 3:30 p.m. Monday, 21⁄2 hours before the meeting was to convene in the meeting room at Town Hall.

“The short answer is that there is no vote necessary to adjourn the meeting to a referendum because the moderator is required to adjourn the meeting per town charter.

“It’s outrageous what was done.”

Kyle Dostaler, chairman of The Chatham Party

“The town charter (Section 4.1) requires the budget meeting to be adjourned (that is, without any vote occurring) directly to the referendum,” Carella wrote.

State statute requires a moderator be chosen to preside at the town meeting, he added.

“Thus, at the town budget meeting, a moderator must be chosen, the call of the meeting read, and the moderator shall then adjourn the meeting to the referendum at the time and date announced, without a vote,” Carella concluded.

That did not sit well with Kyle Dostaler, chairman of the Chatham Party.

“It’s outrageous what was done,” he said. “They removed our right to vote on a town meeting based on an email received by the town manager.

“This is New England. There is a New England

tradition of a town meeting. This is Connecticut, ‘the Constitution State,’ ” and yet the council “is saying there is no way you have a right to vote. I’ve lived here for 20 years and I have been quite active in local politics, and I have never run into a situation where an opinion from a town attorney says that a vote doesn’t matter.”

As a result, he warned, the budget “is going to fail.”

He said both what he considers the unfairness of the situation and the fact that council allotted nearly $600,000 to pay down the tax increase has resulted in “a bad budget.”

“I am voting no because I think you can’t have a town government eroding our voting rights,” he added.

But Maniscalco said Dostaler has the issue backward. Allowing fewer than two dozen residents to vote down the budget Monday would have prevented 13,000 East Hampton residents from having their say on the issue, Maniscalco said.