Once again the annual budget season is upon us. In the coming weeks the Town Council will conduct a series of public hearings and workshops to set the mil rate that establishes the taxes for the upcoming fiscal year.
The spectre of potential cuts in State and Federal funding hovers over the Council’s efforts to develop a budget this year. The chaos of the Trump administration results in increasing cuts of Federal funding to Connecticut. In turn, state legislators struggle to determine funds to towns amidst shifting federal priorities. Here in Rocky Hill, we must make a budget that takes all this uncertainty into account.
The Rocky Hill Town Council is responsible for creating a budget that maintains and perhaps enhances existing services while minimizing tax increases. The task this year is especially difficult due to GOP-led Council budget decisions, which have resulted in increased taxes and stagnant services.
The preamble to the Town Manager’s proposed budget correctly states that a considerable increase in taxes for the 2024-2025 tax period is due to homeowners revaluations. This is, however, only one part of the puzzle. Taxes rose not just because home values increased, but because the town took on significant financial burdens and failed to grow our economic sector.
For example, Rocky Hill was fortunate enough to receive approximately 5.9 million dollars under President Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding during the COVID-19 pandemic era. These ARPA funds were supposed to allow the Council to maintain services and add enhancements as needed. Unfortunately, rather than using the ARPA funding primarily for needed construction or maintenance projects, some ARPA funding was imprudently used for hiring full-time positions at town hall. The full time Emergency Manager position turned into a fiasco and waste of funds. Others hired with ARPA funds which have been exhausted must now be funded by taxpayer tax money.
These funds could have been used to avoid a tax burden. Many years ago the Town Council became aware that Stevens School required a new HVAC system. The HVAC project for Stevens School of approximately 1.6 million dollars could have been partially funded by the Town ARPA funds and partially funded by a State grant. The GOP majority on the Council opted to not accept the grant, but to fund the Stevens HVAC project with local taxpayer dollars over a 3 year period. That project has now been extended even further due to other more urgent projects with the likelihood of increased costs going forward and little chance of obtaining further grants. This will ultimately cost the taxpayers even more money.
Other factors have impacted the tax burden on Rocky Hill’s taxpayers. Reports from the Town Assessor have shown that our business Grand List – a listing of all assessed and taxable properties in town – has remained mostly flat. This means that the bulk of any tax increases faced by the town falls on the backs of residential taxpayers. Hopefully the recently hired Economic Development Manager can make a positive impact, after prior budgets had “frozen” that position, leaving no town staff exclusively working to grow Rocky Hill’s Grand List.
As Democrats have consistently argued, the GOP majority exacerbates the tax burden for residents by overly favoring developers. Take the Republican decision to offer a generous 10+ year abatement for the Kelson Row project. Kelson Row is currently paying approximately $82,000 in taxes as opposed to the pre-revaluation estimated taxes of more than $1 million annually. As multi-family property values have skyrocketed since the pandemic, Kelson Row saw no increase, nor will see any increase, when it could be contributing significantly more than $1 million per year to our tax base at full valuation.
This abatement is not set to expire until 2034. Again, the taxes not paid because of this abatement must be paid by residential tax payers, many of whom are on a fixed income or are struggling families trying to make ends meet.
This year it is very important for the citizen taxpayers of Rocky Hill to make their voices heard. We the members of the Council represent you. Attend budget hearings and workshops and comment. Send in written letters or emails to be read into the public record, sign petitions, write letters to the editor. What are your priorities overall and what are your priorities should Federal or State funding be reduced?
A budget hearing will be held on April 22nd with workshops on April 24th, April 29th and May 1st. Also May 6th and 8th only if necessary. The Council final vote on the budget is on May 19th.
On April 5th, my family and I attended a “Hands Off” rally in Hartford, one of thousands organized simultaneously around the country. Although it was a drizzly day, the crowd of several thousand people before the capitol was upbeat and excited. We cheered for speakers who came to the podium, chanted slogans, and basked in the experience of being in a large social gathering. We, along with many other Rocky Hill Democrats, were gathered here to protest against the Trump presidency and its sweeping efforts to dismantle the federal government and oppress dissenting voices.
For my wife Mara and me, the moment also came with a certain sense of déjà vu. We had been here before. Here we were, a few months into a Trump presidency. The country had been thrown off the rails, and people were taking to the streets. When Trump was first inaugurated we were living just outside Washington, D.C. We spent a lot of our evenings in the first year of our marriage participating in rallies. Our son attended a lot of protests before his first birthday; today, he brought a sign he made on his own.
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Our child in 2017 and 2025
It is fair to say that today Mara and I don’t view protests, even very large ones, as panaceas for our country’s ills. After all, much was made of the fact that the Women’s March of 2017 (which Mara attended) was the largest protest in U.S. history. Despite this and other coordinated marches, strikes, and protests, the Trump presidency ran roughshod over many of the people and issues we held dear. It is clear that a single mass mobilization, even a very large one, usually doesn’t prevent bad people from exercising their power.
But we did attend the rally in Hartford, as did hundreds of thousands of people across the country. Why? What value do protests have?
Historically, a large protest was seen as a major flex for a movement. Pulling off a large gathering in multiple locations was a demonstration of the strength of a movement, a measure not only of the number of bodies it commanded but logistical and organizational power. The 1963 March on Washington (which, by the way, was organized in just eight weeks before the Internet was a thing) was a feat that could not have been accomplished by a movement with less administrative talent. The march was galvanizing force in America and put extreme pressure on the presidency to pass the Civil Rights Act. By contrast, in the era of social media it has become easier to organize protests. The famous protests that resulted in the downfall of the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011 were organized through Twitter and Facebook by an activist living in another country altogether. And yet, in both instances, protests helped to bring dramatic change about.
I love these examples, but they raise the bar a bit high. If participating in a protest doesn’t stop Congress or President Trump from taking action, it should not be considered a failure. Even without toppling a government or enabling critical legislation, protests have value in and of themselves.
Protests build community and identity
For about six months after the 2024 election, my family had an unwelcome visitor. We were one of those “sign houses” that had a political sign up for many Democrats running for state and political office. Added to the mix was a black and white placard saying “Hate has no home here” which was supplied by the Rocky Hill Community Church (RHCC). We’ve kept this sign up ever since we heard about neo-nazi groups trying to organize in our town, and it stayed after the election was over. But its presence must have irritated a Trump supporter, because we started to get house calls.
Once every two or three days, a car would drive by, and the driver would shout out to our house, “Haters live here, haters!” or, more typically, “Trump!”. On special occasions, he would get more creative, and give us countdowns to events like Trump’s inauguration. It was harmless, and honestly a bit sad, but combined with national news it began to feel very disheartening. Trump had won the popular vote! The famous “blue wall” had shattered. We were inundated with news stories about how an emboldened far right had seized power and was wielding it to dismantle our country. Perhaps our visitor represented the actual mood of the country, and I was the outlier.
Social scientists have a term, “pluralistic ignorance”, which describes the feeling of being an isolated minority even when there are many people who agree with you. Protests are one method we have for breaking down that sense of isolation. In a delightful book called Twitter and Teargas, Zeynep Tufekci says that it is “unsurprising, though striking, that community building may be among the most important functions that a protest march or a persistent occupation serves.”
When you are surrounded by hundreds or thousands of people who are chanting together, cheering for the same speaker, and waving signs with aligned messages, you remember that you are not in fact alone, and there is a large community of folks who want to work to make the world better. It is tremendously encouraging. When I asked my own networks why they participated in the rally, the responses overwhelmingly were that they found hope in the sense of community.
“In these [protests] we are building towards an unstoppable force,” said New Britain progressive, Chris Waters. “Right now a small minority is attempting to overthrow our country. Joining these protests shows that there are far more of us and that their actions won’t go unopposed.”
I’ve been joining the weekly rallies organized by the Rocky Hill Congregational Church on our main street. For the past month, we’ve gathered on Main Street and waved signs in support of Black, immigrant, and LGBTQ+ communities. It’s a small gathering, usually less than twenty people, but as we wave our signs there have been frequent honks and waves from drivers passing by. It has been a remarkable reminder of how many people in Rocky Hill don’t stand for what is happening in the country.
By a pleasant coincidence, since I attended the first RHCC rally in Rocky Hill our Trump visitor has yet to make an appearance.
Protests are an opportunity for self expression
Within crowds there is a satisfying space for people to exist as individuals. While attending the Hartford rally I saw people wielding hundreds of different hand-made signs. Each sign reflected the issues and concerns of its maker. In form, they were printed, painted, written in marker, and magazine cut-outs. People clearly had dedicated a lot of time and effort to these placards which likely would not endure beyond a single rainy-day protest.
Again, from Zeynep Tufekci: “We wish to express ourselves, and protests in today’s world often intermingle expressive and instrumental aims…Protesters want the world to change and may be demanding a set of policies or attention to their issues. But protests are also locations of self-expression and communities of belonging and mutual altruism. Protests have always had a strong expressive side, appealing to people’s sense of agency.”
Even though the signs themselves might disappear into the recycle bin, many find identity and creative expression in the act of participating in a protest. That is valuable in and of itself. If that creative expression is restorative, or helps us to marshal the energy to continue to organize, so much the better.
And yes, protests can shape the world
I have focused mostly on the impact of demonstrations on communities and individuals, but protests do play a broader political function as well. The most obvious and visible outcome of a demonstration is that people in power change their position, or lose their authority. More subtle than this, however, is the way that a successful protest can shift public opinion or policy.
A recent study by U.K.-based Social Change Lab argues that some protests, especially large and well-organized ones, can have a meaningful impact on public opinion, public policy, and public discourse. The phenomenon is measurable enough that they recommended philanthropists interested in funding causes invest in protests as a way to achieve the change they were looking for.
Public opinion on “the most important issues facing the country” in the U.K. measurably changed with protest events. Source: YouGov
An illustration from the political right: After Barack Obama’s election in 2008 there was a dramatic mobilization in the form of the Tea Party Movement: a conservative wave focused on government spending. On April 15, 2009, a series of Tea Party protests mobilized in the U.S. As often happens, in some parts of the country it rained, which tends to depress turnout. This made for a fascinating case study, in which political scientists were able to measure the impact of protest size on the upcoming elections. It turns out that larger political protests facilitated the strengthening of the conservative movement and led to more Republican votes in the 2010 midterm elections. Perhaps this is something that will inspire the political left.
So, join a protest
All of this is to say that protests play an important role in our political process. But they aren’t the only way to get involved. I spoke with Kerry Wood, Rocky Hill’s representative in the State Legislature, and her big takeaway from the day that it should be a call to action for people to get engaged.
“Participating in Democracy at any level is the value, what I’m seeing and hearing daily are people raising their voices where they can. I have been to dozens of fundraisers, rallies, press conferences, and networking events in the past week. Every event has an energy level that I haven’t seen in years. What we gain from these events is a renewed sense of purpose, community, and support structure. We can’t sit back, in any way people know how, their participation in the fight for Democracy is welcomed and encouraged.”
If you participated in a protest yesterday and are fired up for change, use that energy to join an organization. Obligatory plug: I joined my town’s Democratic Committee and I’ve found that to be a great outlet for my activism energy. But find what works for you! Maybe you want to support the local chapters of the ALCU, or find another organization that focuses on your particular interest area: climate, housing, etc. Join a local progressive group. Just get engaged, and the rest will follow.
