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Question #4 or #5, depending on where in the district you are, is a non-binding public policy question to give a suggestion to the state representative for our district, as follows:

“Shall the state representative from this district be instructed to vote in favor of legislation distributing $450 million from the state’s ‘rainy day’ stabilization fund to the cities and towns of the Commonwealth for residential property tax relief?”

There’s a lot more involved in this question than meets the eye at first. Part of Ron Chernisky‘s campaign against Rep. Geraldo Alicea is that Alicea voted against some amendments that would have taken money from the “rainy day” stabilization fund and distributed it to towns as unrestricted local aid. In fact, part of Chernisky’s campaign staff worked at getting this question on the ballot in this district. (It’s on the ballot in a few other districts as well, unrelated to the Chernisky campaign as far as I can tell.)

“4. Shall the Town of Charlton be allowed to exempt from the provisions of proposition two and one-half, so-called, the amounts required to pay for the bond issued in order to design, construct, and equip a new highway operations facility?”

As a little background for those unfamiliar with Prop. 2½, it was a measure passed by ballot initiative in 1980. Each municipality in Massachusetts has a “levy limit”, which is the maximum that they can levy in property taxes each year. This limit gets increased each year by 2½% plus an adjustment for any new growth in the town. However, a town can pass a ballot question to increase their levy limit permanently (a “Prop 2½ Override”) or temporarily to pay for something (a “Prop 2½ Debt Exclusion” or “Prop 2½ Capital Outlay Exclusion”). (Although often colloquially the temporary form will be called an “override” as well.)

Question #3 would prohibit dog races on which betting or wagering occurs.

This seems like a question that targets people’s emotions. “Oh, think of the pretty dogs and how they’re abused.” While I’m sure that some abuses occur, I would tend to think (not really knowing anything of the industry) that if you own a champion racing dog, you’d try to take good care of it so that it would win you races for as long as posible.

Question #2 this year would replace the criminal penalties for possession of one ounce or less of marijuana with a new system of civil penalties.

I understand and appreciate the arguments in favor of it, but I think the arguments against it are more compelling. An ounce of marijuana is actually a good amount (56 individual sales according to the District Attorneys Association), first-time offenders get probation and don’t get a publicly-available criminal record, and it’s just not a good public image for the government to say that “minor” drug use is “okay”, and we’ll just charge you a $100 tax when you get caught. I don’t believe that it will save $30 million in police costs, and I think that it’s a good use of police time to try to get drugs off the streets, and get the drug users into the probation and rehabilitation programs.

I think I’ll do a blog series on my thoughts on the five ballot questions that I’ll be voting on this coming Tuesday. (If you want to see if your town has added questions to the three statewide ones, plug your address into the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’s Election Division Voting Info site.)

Question #1 is about repealing the state income tax. I’m wholeheartedly for voting for this question. I think the main goal of getting it to pass is to force the Legislature to take a hard look at its programs, and cut those that it really doesn’t need. I think that the 40% reduction in their budget is possible, but I’m expecting that they won’t actually reduce things that much. I mean, there was a ballot initiative that passed in 2000 to lower the income tax from 5.85% to 5.0%, and the Legislature basically ignored it, although they did eventually slowly lower it to the current 5.3%. (Although, you can still voluntarily pay 5.85% if you want. I always get a chuckle out of that check box on the state tax form.) So, it seems unlikely that they’ll actually just keep all other taxes the same and cut the 40% of the budget. But I bet they’ll cut some things, overall taxes will be somewhat lower than they are now, and it at least sends a message that we’re tired of paying for expensive government programs that don’t work. I hope that this will increase transparency of our state government, as they publicly demonstrate what is and isn’t important to them.

As far as I can tell, Charlton doesn’t have an organized Town Republican Committee.

However, Southbridge now has two.

(Today’s T&G, Today’s Southbridge Evening News (PDF))

So, it sounds like it’d be easy to organize a Charlton Committee if people were interested in it. However, it’s probably too late for it to do any good for this year’s elections.

Since we found a cat on Monday and let him out to see if he’d go home, he’s basically stayed on our porch and tried to come in at every opportunity. So, last night we let him in again, and are keeping him in our basement. Charlton Animal Control is coordinating the effort to find his owner.

• Last Saturday’s PTQ was busy and a long day, with 154 players. But, it was fun and a good event.
• Yesterday evening, Jessi found a black longhair cat by our house that seemed hungry and cold, but obviously belongs to somebody due to his collar and friendliness. Jessi let him inside and fed him. Animal Control gave us a collar with a message attached (presumably to call them if found) and told us to put him back out to see if he would go home. He was still on our porch this morning, though.

My Touchstream LP broke almost two years ago, and I’ve been quite unhappy with needing to type and mouse the traditional way that whole time. However, someone at work had one that had been broken for a while, but only needed to replace the ribbon cable between the halves. I bought the cable, it arrived this morning, and we managed to eventually install it. It’s shorter than the one that come with it, so it’s barely making contact and the halves are too close together. But, the keyboard works great. I’m suspecting I can make arrangements to buy the keyboard.

It’s handy to be able to check your credit report to ensure that the information companies are reporting about you is accurate. It’s especially important to check before you plan on applying for credit, but errors can sometimes take a while to resolve, so it’s a good plan to check regularly anyway. There are 3 credit reporting bureaus in the U.S.

Federal law (FCRA) allows you to get one report from each bureau for free every 12 months.
Massachusetts law (M.G.L. c.93, § 59(d)) allows you to get one report from each bureau for free within each calendar year. (Some other states have similar laws.)