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Youth sport funding shouldn’t be an entitlement
 

In easy-to-understand terms, “user fee” means simply this: If you play, you pay. Traditionally, towns facing budget crises pass on the cost of the youth sports programs to the participating families, who typically pay something like $25 per child per sport – or more. At this town meeting, however, we essentially did away with the user fee idea and came another step closer to 100% taxpayer-subsidized extracurricular activities.

The $15,000 expenditure doesn’t defray the cost of public school sports, but rather community-based programs such soccer, baseball and the like. In the ‘big picture’ overview, one might argue that a $15,000 appropriation at taxpayer expense won’t make or break the town. Framed against the backdrop of an overall $27 million budget, it may seem insignificant. But approving it sets a dangerous precedent. At a time when we are losing teachers, administrators and programs due to Silver Lake Regional School Committee budget cuts, it defies logic that we would even contemplate funding optional programs such as these.

More perplexing is how any parent, let alone several of them who spoke at town meeting, could position this as an issue of fairness to children. Here is the basic recap of that argument. “All children should be able to play sports. If we don’t appropriate these monies, we parents will have to pay $25 or more per sport per child to participate in these programs. We may have to pick and choose the sports that our children should play. It’s not fair.”

Exactly how would refusing to do this have been unfair? And is it “fair” to expect everyone in town to subsidize these programs?

There’s no question that sporting programs have value. They teach character, team building, self-esteem and can open doors for youngsters. Who knows, perhaps the next Pedro Martinez or (forgive me, my fellow Yankees-haters) Derek Jeter may be in our midst. But funding sporting programs should not be an automatic entitlement, due every family who buys a house within our borders. That kind of thinking may make sense in some far-away socialist society (like Switzerland or Oregon) but Kingston taxpayers can’t afford to be held hostage by every special interest request that comes along.

It seems that we often lose sight of the big picture in our small town. Or maybe it’s just that as a community were are too de-centralized to work cohesively toward one common goal. We are debating a ballot override to prevent the loss of more teaching positions and public school programs.

We make our police chief wait six months for a cruiser he needs, and then approve incidental expenses not on the basis of how beneficial they are, or how necessary, but rather on what special interest group is best organized or complains the most vocally.

All the while, we watch our tax bills rise higher and higher. I worry about fellow citizens who are on fixed incomes and suffer the tax increases that follow every time taxpayers simply refuse to say “Good idea, but we can’t afford it.”

We taxpayers should reasonably expect the following return on our tax dollar investments: (1) A public education system that enables families to send as many children through as they have, whether that’s one, two or twelve; (2) Good police, fire and public safety protection; (3) Roads that get plowed during the winter; and (4) A town government that helps rather than hinders the quality of life in town.

But a free ride on youth programs, at least in this writer’s opinion, doesn’t fit under the basic bill of rights that comes with being a Kingstonian.

As you may have guessed, I was one of the “no” votes on that expenditure – not because I don’t see its value but because it is an extra service that should be paid for by the users. If you look at the history of our growing sports program, we as a town have shot ourselves in the foot (metaphorically speaking) several times in our attempt to bring a greater youth sports program to the community.

We said ‘no’ to an offer from P.A. Landers that would have provided us with our $1.7 million ballfields essentially for free, in large part because of the political considerations that went with giving this company the opportunity to remove gravel from the fields they would prepare.

Instead, we voted to fund it with taxpayer dollars. It could be argued that the fields we end up with are well worth the $1.7 million we forked over to create them. But it’s difficult to understand why we opted to spend that much when we could have had something similar for free.

Then there is the issue of upkeep and management of the fields. A private firm has offered to do that at no cost to the town, and our leadership voted against relinquishing “control” and kept operation under the town’s control. The end result is more burden on the taxpayers.

I wonder what the ultimate pricetag will be for maintaining control and treating this program as an entitlement, rather than an extra service.

Finance committee chairman John LaBrache attempted to bring a level of fiscal reason to the town meeting, when he reminded voters, “If you spend it here, it has to come out of someplace else.”

That, in a nutshell, is our town’s problem. We spend without thinking of the big picture. As a community, we have expended a significant investment in these ballfields and they should be available to anyone in the community who wants to use them. But the taxpayers have already footed enough of the costs. User fees are a fair and equitable way to distribute the cost among the actual users – whether that is for using our new ballfields or participation in any of the town sports programs at other locations. That is what we should have voted at the Saturday session of town meeting.

The ballfields committee has worked hard to bring this program to where it is and, project controversies aside, they deserve our thanks. And the specific line item I reference in this column is not an expenditure of their creation.

It was, rather, the focal point that raises a larger issue. Whether it’s a sporting program, renovating an old building, or even buying up land for open space, we as a town need to put a sharper focus on how we spend money. We are a growing community with ever-increasing expenses and sometimes we need to remember that it’s not a crime to say “We can’t afford it.” Uttering those four words more frequently may be the greatest gift we give ourselves – a community where people can afford to live.

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