[Chat] RE: [Discussion] Last Night's Budget Hearing

Christine Gray Langwidge at erols.com
Tue Mar 30 10:36:33 EST 2004


Christian, if no one can speak up and get a response from the uppa uppas,
how do you know that they learned these items?

Christine

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-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion-bounces at charlesvillage.info
[mailto:Discussion-bounces at charlesvillage.info]On Behalf Of Wilson
Sent: Wednesday, March 31, 2004 9:22 AM
To: Charles Village Discussion List
Cc: [unknown]; Wilson
Subject: [Discussion] Last Night's Budget Hearing

To all:

Last night's budget hearing was a farce.  The community could not even ask
questions of the budget committee.   (Like why are there vast declines in
bugeted insurance costs when liability and other insurance products are
increasing every where else?  An explanation would have been appreciated
but Morgan Allyn's gag rule extended to even the budget.)  We had to assume
that Janet Levine, the "Executive Director", has not fulfilled the first
and most important duty of her legislated position of "Administrator" since
no one on the budget committee was allowed to answer the question "Did Ms.
Levine provide the committee with actual receipts of grant and fundraised
monies this past year?"  It was more like facing a panel of soviet
ministers than what should have been an informative dialogue between the
community and the governmental entity which is supposed to serve it.

Last night's meeting was an opportunity for three people to tell the world
how great they were and what they do.  (Nothing was true.  Nothing was
achieved.  You know the Charles Village area is filthy.  You know that it
is full of crime.  Nothing has changed in 10 years.)  However, the Benefits
District did learn last night that they are not a Foundation, but a
governmental agency.  If you want to prove it to yourself look up the City
Charter, it is right there in black and white.  They also learned that the
position that Sandy Sparks and the by-law committee wants to give so much
power to (and it's anyone's guess why) is called the "Administrator", not
the "Executive Director", or the proposed "Chief Executive Officer", but
simply Administrator.

They also learned that the community is concerned by the great increase in
crime and that we now know they eliminated $20,000. from their budget for
off-duty cops.  What we didn't tell them
last night is that the audit shows that the Benefits District/Foundation
lost $20,000. on the Festival and therefore CVCA surely lost the $2,000.
they loan to the Festival every year without any contract.

The CVCBD's budget is "voodoo" and is built of wishes, hopes and fund
raising which they have never been able to accomplish despite Frank
Januzzi's statements to the contrary.  The only way that they will be able
to fund the Benefits District is to change the wording on the surtax
limitations which by-law committee members Sandra Sparks and Morgan Allyn
are working on at this minute.

So the CVCBD wants to impose a non-working, voodoo budget on the community
for services and programs that have proven to be completely unsuccessful
and they want to be able to increase the amount of surtaxes they can
collect from all of us as soon as the legislation passes and your homes get
reassessed.  You can do nothing.  You can sit complacently.  Or you can
demand from your elected officials that enough is enough.

Christian

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