Only after we make the cuts can the healing begin

Many of the roads in this town are in sad shape. It looks like they’re going to stay that way for a while.

Summer is only a month away, but in Lebanon, it might as well be the winter of our discontent.

Between writeoffs and debt restructuring due to flawed, inept running of the town’s Rescue Department for several years, taxpayers find themselves, as usual, bearing the brunt of government’s inability to police its own departments.

Who is to blame? If Lebanon were a ballclub, the manager in charge during the failed pennant race would have already stepped down in disgrace or been fired.

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine sent me a story out of Washington in which some worker at one of our bloated federal agencies was caught (shall we say with his pants down) watching several hours of porn at his work computer every day for years. He’s still got his job, doing God knows what!

Is this any way to run a business?

Would you continue to employ this man?

That man has a job probably making $100,000 a year, while many of us work 12-hour days just trying to get by or struggle to make ends meet on a fixed retirement income.

It is infuriating and shows you the incredible inertia in Washington, and sometimes at 15 Upper Guinea Road.

In Lebanon, somewhere around $200,000 was lost through fiscal mismanagement or worse; we may never know. It may not be worth it to try to find the answer.

But what we do know is we have to pay all that money back. You won’t see $200,000 on any warrant article appropriation question tomorrow night, but you will see a lot of FEMA money that was allocated by the federal government to the town in the wake of several severe winter storms over the recent past, including the 2008 ice storm. Most town departments also had to give up some of this year’s budget, the lion’s share by Highway.

Now it’s legal for the town to spend that FEMA money any way it wants, but wouldn’t you think it was probably intended to pay town expenses and damage done from those storms?

Think of what else that $200,000 could have bought. A playground? An addition to one of the schools? Maybe a new Rescue Department building? A fire truck?

The town’s two newest selectmen bear no blame in what happened with Rescue. They weren’t in office when the deal went down. They are part of the solution.

And it is true that we voted in all the proposals that allowed a flawed Rescue Department to achieve fiscal ruin. But the proposals didn’t fail. It was human error, from the former department heads to selectmen who either allowed it to continue or lacked the backbone or will to insist on more oversight.

But it’s a new day. Elections are coming up in June. Keep the ball rolling, Lebanon.

- HT