A recipe for disaster: Take a community of 30,000 people in a city that’s living beyond its residents’ means, create one Proposition 2 1/2 override after another, ballooning the city budget and compounding costs, create new taxes or fees along with the Community Preservation Act tax, add increased water and sewer rates on top of new stormwater run-off fees, refuse to listen to residents who say they can’t afford the cost of living in the city.
Do that, and you can look forward to a city that is on an unsustainable path for the residents and business residing here.
This is a community where most residents have not seen an increase in wages in 10 years. Do not force landlords to continually raise rents to pay the cost of a city that’s on a path in which only the prosperous enough can stay here.
All residents need to discuss what we are willing, or can afford, to pay for in the city. Then we need to make cuts to the ballooning budget now before a once-thriving community becomes the dead town of the 1980s again, which many of the older folks remember vividly.
Northampton must stop over-spending.
Andrew Church
Florence