Here is the vote count for the school budget defeat tonight:Yes- 1065,No- 1163 (47.8% in favor)
The first vote was: Yes- 799 No-831 (49.0% in favor)
Maybe the moral to the story is this: It’s hard to sell a budget when members of the board who authored the budget actively campaign against tax increases apparently oblivious to the fact that their very own budget contains tax increases. And for good measure approve administrative pay raises.
And let’s not forget that the first budget would have likely passed had the board and administration supported the museum in good faith. You needed to flip 32 votes. Instead they defeated the budget, shuttered the museum and in the end, paid more taxpayer dollars for the revote process than just remediating the bat issue at the museum in the first place while simultaneously garnering ill will of a portion of the community.
It’s a trifecta.
Oh, one more thing: Trumpeting the Bacon closure and losing a key budget voting bloc makes not a winning marketing and sales strategy.
Disclosure: I did not vote today for the reasons in prior posts.
