By RUSS OLIVO

LINCOLN — If Councilman John Flynn has his way, the Financial Town Meeting would go the way of the tyrannosaurus and the pterodactyl.

Like its reptilian predecessors, the Financial Town Meeting, according to Flynn, is a creature of the past.
“While some say the financial town meeting is the purest form of democracy, I disagree. About 2 percent of voters participate in the financial town meeting,” Flynn said in a press release. “Democracy is when everyone can participate either directly or through their elected representatives.”
A fixture of small-town political life in New England that dates back centuries, annual financial meetings are typically the last nail in the coffin of fiscal year budgets, regardless of what other officials have proposed during deliberations.
In towns with financial town meetings, as long as what voters propose doesn’t violate any other tax-capping measures on the books, the will of the voting majority at the open-to-the-public meetings becomes the fiscal law of the land.
It doesn’t always go the way some officials want, with a prime example beings this year’s recent FTM, according to Flynn.
Someone at the meeting proposed adding a half-million dollars to the budget to help fund education, and a majority of the people gathered in the auditorium of Lincoln High School agreed. The net result was an unexpected tax increase for all property owners next year of 2.9 percent, according to Flynn.
What happened at the meeting just wasn’t fair to the majority townwide, according to Flynn, because it resulted in a tax increase that wasn’t proposed or supported by officials elected by a cross-section of voters. And, while he has no proof, Flynn says he suspects that those who supported spending the extra money at the town meeting were disproportionately interested in education — in so many words, not a broad cross-section of voters.
“After the vote, many of them got up to leave, so they were obviously only there for that reason,” Flynn said in an interview.
Efforts were unsuccessful to reach Lincoln Town Administrator T. Joseph Almond for his opinion on Flynn’s proposal. But Almond, too, was less than thrilled about a perceived hijacking of the budgetary agenda by a non-representative minority.
In a recent letter to the editor, Almond wrote, “Unfortunately, at this year’s financial town meeting we witnessed a concerted effort by union leaders, political candidates and some elected officials to impose a needless half-million dollar tax increase onto our property owners.”
In order to reform the system, Flynn said he will propose a measure at the June 17 Town Council meeting proposing a townwide referendum on the abolition of the financial town meeting. The measure, he said, would replace the meeting with a new system that hoists the yeoman’s work of setting the budget on the Budget Board, the council and the town administrator.
A similar proposal was soundly defeated in a referendum four years ago, according to Flynn, but the new proposal is different because it offers a sound alternative to the FTM.
No such alternative was discussed prior to the last referendum, which may have prompted many voters to reject the measure.
Under Flynn’s proposal, the town administrator would continue to submit a proposed budget to the Budget Board each year for review, much as the current system. The Budget Board does a “remarkable” job of fine-tuning the budget each year, and works very hard at it, according to Flynn.
But instead of letting FTM voters have the final say, the budget would go to the Town Council for approval. The town administrator would have veto power and the council would have override power, according to Flynn.
To make the Budget Board more accountable, Flynn proposes having members who are elected to five-year terms in place of appointees. The process would also allow public hearings on the budget to give interested parties an opportunity to plead their cases to the Town Council before the budget is approved, according to Flynn.
“This process would put the responsibility for spending decisions where it belongs, on the shoulders of the elected officials,” Flynn says. “The financial town meeting does not work for the taxpayers of Lincoln.”