Let the great game of Chess begin! As the Patch reported yesterday: the State granted Belmont $7.5 Million to build a new library across Concord Ave from the library’s current location. The grant, for the construction of a 45,000 square foot,…
Category: budget
Live Blogging Town Meeting
Live blogging here from Spring Town Meeting. We’ve been here for close to two hours and are still snagged in debate of the first substantive issue: approval of a new stabilization fund for Minuteman Technical. The idea here is to…
Town Meeting Hat Trick: Live Blog
We’re here at the third installment of Town Meeting, after a quick and dirty detour through a special Town Meeting. Rep. Will Brownsberger is giving us an update on the budget picture at the State level and, of intense interest…
Belmont Town Meeting Notes: Live Blog
We’re here at Town Meeting – we’ve dispensed with a lot of administrative business and are on to the meat of the Spring town meeting: Article 16 which is asking TM to approve the concept of the preliminary design of…
Belmont: Middle of the pack for per resident school spending
There are three zillion different ways you can slice the school spending pie and analyze the numbers, and none of them are particularly satisfying. One way, however, is to look at how much each town spends per resident on its…
This week at Warrant Committee: Override Planning and Mysterious Fire Dept. Expenses
BloggingBelmont contributor Adriana Poole provides an account of this week’s Warrant Committee meeting, where discussion turned to reevaluating the allocation of funding for the School Dept. and the Town, and some mysterious cost overruns at the Fire Department.
Possible Cuts at Belmont High outlined in Principal’s Letter
A letter from Belmont High School Principal Mike Harvey details the cuts that would be necessary at the High School should the town fail to ask for or pass a Proposition 2 1/2 Override to repair a structural hole in the town’s finances.
Questioning the Development=Kids Equation
An op-ed in the Citizen Herald charges that the O’Neil and Cushing Square developments will send more than 200 new children to our schools. But will they? A 2003 study suggests that the link between development and school population is difficult to make.
The Override Playbook: Chill ‘Em then Kill ‘Em
There’s good reason to be very, very, very suspicious of the Board of Selectmen’s call to delay a vote on an override. In fact, the push to delay a vote on the override is part of a well worn strategy for sinking it, altogether.
Selectmen on override: 6 months, 180 degrees
The question for those of you who are planning to attend tonight’s meeting of the Board of Selectmen should be “what has changed” for Belmont since last Spring, when both Selectman Jones and Paolillo ardently supported passage of an Override. If the town needed it in June, why is it suddenly unworthy in January now that our budget deficit has grown and all-important one time funds, such as the Federal ARRA grants, have dried up?!