Vote Yes On Budget To Protect Legal Defense Fund
The following letter is shared with us by the author Ruth Platner. Ruth is a member of the Charlestown Planning Commission.
In 2017, Charlestown defended itself against the Federal Railroad Administration, which planned to bisect our town with a new high-speed track through homes, conservation land, and historic villages. We won that fight largely with hard work and bluster, but we came very close to having to fight the battle in federal court under the National Environmental Protection Act. That would have required hiring a Washington law firm to work with Charlestown – and that requires money.
Money for that kind of fight would come from Charlestown’s Legal Defense Fund – a fund that the proposed budget would fortify with $125,000 from the surplus account. Opponents of the budget have criticized putting those funds in the Legal Defense Fund and they want to pull the money back into the surplus fund to save for an unknown future project.
Besides the railroad, we’ve recently stopped the trucking of our groundwater to cool Invenergy’s power plant, and the construction of a Dollar General that would have displaced local small businesses. All of these left town without a major legal challenge, but we may not always win so easily.
If the Legal Defense Fund is unneeded, the money stays in there unspent, costing the taxpayers nothing. Its purpose would be clear. Mingling the money in the surplus account won’t lower the tax rate, but it will lock up those funds where they can’t be accessed at the critical time they are needed.
Even if it did lower taxes, what would be the goal of making Charlestown weak in defending against big developers? The big developers of course want to see this money removed from the budget, but why would we?
The banner image is a photo of the Acela passing through Kenyon at the Charlestown/Richmond border.
May 26, 2020 @ 1:26 pm
Having a well funded legal defense fund is an excellent weapon to discourage legal attackers, namely we have the ammunition to fight back.
May 22, 2020 @ 6:35 am
Everyone is urged to have emergency money on hand and save for s rainy day, but most cannot or choose to spend today. Having contingency funds seems a good idea when one can save in years of extra cash to make up for “lean years”.whether to combat natural disasters, legal battles, or other unfoseen occurrences. Legal battles can be expensive or settling claims, as we have experienced in the past.
May 21, 2020 @ 7:07 pm
Seems the surplus account should be there for all unexpected costs that may come up town-wide. To allocate any portion to a specific entity depletes the cache available for some unforeseen occurrence requiring funding, not to mention other town departments may feel entitled to same nest egg. As we are limited to a surplus tied to the budget by a percentage, would this not be just be a shell game of moving the surplus out from under the budget rule?