Now that the November elections are several months behind us and the proverbial dust has settled, we are looking at a new horizon. The new challenges we face all seem to appear to be financial. Every department and organization within every community government is clamoring for additional dollars, yet the reality is that there aren’t any.

Of course, accepting fiscal reality and fiduciary responsibility hasn’t seemed to bother folks in Massachusetts, nor many other states in this country for the past 10 years. The rule of the day was spend. Spend whether you have it or not, and if it isn’t there, put it on the credit card. The good times and the supply of money appeared endless. Of course, any reasonable person based in reality knows that isn’t the case. Money has to come from somewhere and at the end of the game it is you and I the taxpayer. No one had foreseen the financial calamity that was about to befall us. The proverbial house of cards finally fell.

Where do we go from here? Well, “experts” tell us that we will experience another three years of high unemployment at a bare minimum. Others state that newly enacted and proposed new federal laws will hinder, or worse, suffocate business and employment recovery in the short and long term. For the sake of argument let’s accept this premise at face value. Like every prudent and responsible household in the U.S.A., you can’t spend what you don’t have. You’ll notice, I use the words prudent and responsible. We must become increasingly more prudent and responsible with the spending of our tax dollars. Every municipal entity must conserve. There are no sacred cows. We have to watch where every penny is spent. People, generally, have a tendency to become cavalier when the money being spent isn’t coming directly out of their own pockets. Well, they had better become more aware. The governor of Massachusetts has already announced that local government will be receiving less monies this fiscal year than last and that state spending in many other areas will decline or cease. I am not going to point fingers at this point, but several departments in Hanson have admirably and commendably made sacrificial cuts in spending, while others have unbelievably increased spending and are demanding more. We are all in the same lifeboat folks. We are all in this for the long haul. We either cooperate and work diligently to make this thing work and sacrifice equally, or the lifeboat capsizes. We created this mess by a lack of due diligence, it is up to us to clean it up.

Tom Constantine
Brook Street