The taxpayers strike back!

No More Overrides! (click here to save your hard earned dollars)

UPDATE: 5:30 PM Where's Mr. Hood when you need him? So I was trying to add a sitemeter to the website and somehow managed to republish a draft version from a month ago. Yikes! Have contacted tech support and our other webmaster, so hopefully it will be restored to the version seen above soon.

UPDATE: Saturday morning: So Ricky Boy Hood, unfortunately a shoe in candidate for School Committee, is reporting over on Catherine Sanderson's blog that A-Rod is having a medical procedure done in Miami (which had originally been planned for mid-to-late April, when of course the weather in Amherst turns rather pleasant.)

Ricky Boy does not explain the sudden change in plans, or why the Superintendent did not think it important enough to let the Regional School Committee know or why officials did not post it on the ARPS website for all to see.

Hmm...so much for "transparency."

ORIGINAL POST:
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Winston Churchill (no relation to Andy)

What informed readers want.

So first of all, Amherst has according to our toothless watchdog the Finance Committee (report of January, 2007) approved 10 of 18 Overrides over the past 25 years. Yes, some of them were menu Override where on the same day/ballot a few items appeared, but still The People’s Republic of Amherst has on numerous occasions approved tax Overrides. Thus saying “only 2” is not even close, even by hand grenade measuring.

And of course the other hilarious hypocrisy is the Gazette touts “transparency” as a reason why Northampton just passed a $2 million Override; but the Gazette has also recently taken them to the woodshed (which indeed they should) for not keeping good Public Records notes during executive sessions --especially since those sessions seemed to be related to a $1.2 million buyout of homes near the landfill.

Duh!

Princess Stephanie: try to keep up.

The time to put a Proposition 2.5 Override on the current local ballot election (3/31) has long since passed. So if you want to do an Override it will have to be a stand-alone election costing the taxpayers an additional $12,000 to $14, 000. And, like the last time, you will get your ass kicked.

Since it takes the Town Clerk about 35 days to do all the legal stuff she needs to do in order to make an election happen (and you don’t meet again until March23’rd) you would be pushing the unwritten law (that Comrade Gerry Weiss seems to take so seriously) about not having an election when the students are away, courtesy of Eric the Rat --a dead Hippie who would have been happier at Hampshire College rather than Umass.

So just tell the folks the reality: President Obama may come to the rescue via Federal money, but forget about local money via a Proposition 2.5 Override.