06/07/2004: 
Breaking News
Rich Aucoin Is For Radical Tax Reform: Libertarian has ideas for Waltham budget
from Waltham News Tribune
Nobody ever accused Richard Aucoin of thinking small.
City councilors tomorrow night will likely shave a bit of the city's $160 million budget. But Aucoin believes the council should be cutting not only in the whole numbers, but in the double digits.
Last fall, Aucoin and his Waltham Citizens for Taxpayer Justice barnstormed the city with a ballot initiative proposing to lop off a quarter of the budget. He also ran a campaign for City Council in which he showed the same penchant for downsizing government.
Both Aucoin's bids came up far short at the polls, but the former lieutenant governor candidate says he is not about to give up on his Libertarian Party ideals.
The last two Waltham mayors have bragged about taking the fat off their budgets in a tough economy and keeping percentage increases among the lowest in recent memory. Last year, David Gately increased his budget 2.5 percent, and this year Jeannette McCarthy's proposed budget was 3.2 percent higher than Gately's.
Still, Aucoin insists both budgets show that spending continues to go in the wrong direction.
"What the latest budget increase tells us is that it's business as usual at City Hall," Aucoin wrote in an e-mail exchange with the Daily News Tribune. "No serious effort is being made by anyone in city government to eliminate the waste."
Aucoin, a mechanical designer by trade, has maintained a simple message about Waltham's budget: city spending (not to mention state and federal spending) has been spiraling out of control and has been doing so for a long time.
Last year's municipal budget was about 90 percent higher than it was in 1990 and 25 percent higher than in 1998, Aucoin used to point out on the stump. "Has your paycheck risen by 25 percent in last five years?" Aucoin was fond of asking.
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Today, Aucoin says, if he were on the council -- or in the mayor's office -- he knows exactly where he'd look to start cutting."Waltham's taxpayers are being charged approximately $19,000 per employee, per year for the health insurance packages of upper-echelon city employees," Aucoin says, "while many Waltham residents (approximately 6,000) have no health insurance at all, or pay through the nose for it."
The city, Aucoin says, could save $11 million from the $25 million it spends on employee health insurance if it only renegotiated "these bloated benefits...to be reflective of what the average private-sector employee is receiving."
Also in Aucoin's dream budget would be a different approach to education.
Bring Waltham in line with average state spending on schools, Aucoin says, and the city will save another $20 million.
"Waltham taxpayers are being forced to pay over $13,200 per student per year," about $5,000 per student higher than the state average, Aucoin says, "and that does not even include the costs associated with the eight new schools."
While Aucoin's group did manage to collect 3,200 signatures last summer to get its Question 1 measure on the ballot, the initiative didn't even collect two-thirds of that number of votes at the November polls.
With school, public safety and other city officials, as well as candidates for office nearly unanimously condemning the measure as a threat to city services, Question 1 lost by more than a 5-1 margin. Aucoin himself finished last among the nine candidates for at large councilor.
Aucoin claimed Friday that the election was essentially decided by the local unions who showed "the ability to far outspend our people's initiative and to get out the vote to save their perks."
Now, Aucoin says, without a Libertarian voice in city office, residents remain tethered to the whims of spend-happy politicians.
"Without any political clout of our own, we everyday citizens can only point to the most blatant examples of waste," he says. "We don't have the political access needed to find and expose the rest."
If it were the Waltham Citizens for Taxpayer Justice's budget, "We would roll up our sleeves and eliminate this waste," Aucoin says.
