The following reflects the opinion of the author.
I’ll say plainly what I wrote about back in May, in a personal piece about what these cuts cost kids: I’m not originally from East Hampton. I grew up in Berlin, Connecticut, the first person in my family to go to college and the child of an immigrant, with no family roadmap for any of it. When my hometown’s budget got squeezed, families felt the cuts. Years later, the programs came back, and when they did, I used every one of them to build the record that eventually got me to a doctorate.
Now I’m a working mother and a taxpayer in East Hampton, watching the same pressure land on our kids. So yes, I have a personal stake in saying this: East Hampton has been failing budgets and re-fighting them for at least two decades. The town needed five separate referendums to pass one budget back in the 2006-07 fiscal year. It failed three in a row as recently as 2015, and is now on track for a third round this fiscal year. And it keeps happening while barely three in ten eligible voters, by the best estimate available, bother to show up either way.
If you’re a parent who scrambled this summer because Smart Start vanished with no warning, you have every right to be furious. If you’re a longtime resident on a fixed income staring at a revaluation that just reshuffled who pays for it all, you have every right to be furious, too. What nobody has the right to do is sit this one out and then complain about whichever version of “furious” wins.
Here’s my actual ask, and it cuts both ways. Before anyone cuts one more dollar from a classroom, I’d like someone at Town Hall to walk residents through the line items that don’t touch a single kid or a single pothole: contingency funds, dues and fees, take-home vehicles, and program budgets that have grown year over year regardless of enrollment or need. Show your work. If there’s real fat, cut it loudly and specifically, not by quietly letting a pre-K program lapse and mailing the letter home in late July. But if the honest answer is that there isn’t much fat left to cut, then say that out loud, too, because “just trim it” is not a budget plan, it’s a slogan, and this town has run on that slogan through two failed votes already this year alone.
And here’s the other half of it. East Hampton keeps fighting over how to slice a grand list that leans harder on homeowners every revaluation cycle, while a sewer expansion and the housing it would unlock sits tangled in years of Town Council back-and-forth. You cannot cut your way to a lower mill rate forever in a town that isn’t growing its commercial and housing base. Every year we punt on smart, deliberate growth is another year homeowners alone absorb the next revaluation swing. If we actually want to share the tax burden instead of just redistributing it among ourselves every three years, that means finishing the hard conversations about where and how this town grows, not just where it cuts.
None of that happens with turnout stuck less than three in ten and a Facebook comment section doing the work public hearings should be doing. Show up. Read the budget. Ask the annoying question about the contingency line. Vote like your kid’s future and your neighbor’s ability to afford their bills both depend on it, because they do.
Kim Tynik is a contributor to The Bellringer. This story draws on official town records, town meeting minutes, and the public reporting cited above. All figures are from publicly available sources unless otherwise noted. The commentary section reflects the author’s own opinion and is separate from the reported facts above it.