Dear Readers,

After spending most of my adult life covering politics, from presidents to planning boards, I can assure you no public official wants to raise taxes. In fact, most pols would rather be poked in the eye with a sharp stick than support a tax hike.

That said, we all know things cost more today than they did last week. The days of the 5 cent cup of coffee and the $1.25 Titleist golf ball are long gone.

At the local level, health insurance premiums seem to grow faster than a 14-year-old boy. Towns can no longer purchase a Chevy or Ford police car for $2,300. Gas is no longer 29 cents a gallon. Folks at the town office and state house are no longer happy with a job paying $5 an hour.

What are our friends at the local level, the town school committee and boards of selectmen, faced with soaring expenses, funded for the most part by property taxes, to do? Sock it to their neighbors?

In the early 1970s, Maine legislators, faced with local folks who complained of ever increasing property tax bills, decided to share some of their bounty with the locals and send a few dollars back to the towns. They called it revenue sharing.

Now that the state budget is in the hole by a “ka-jillion” dollars, Gov. Paul LePage and some state legislators have decided to slash this revenue sharing. The towns, (surprise) are screaming.

Several years ago, when our former governor, a Democrat, proposed to cut state revenue sharing, our current governor, then the Republican mayor of Waterville, blasted him for even thinking of cutting the payments to local governments.

Now that the former Waterville mayor lives in the Blaine House, he not only wants to slash revenue sharing to the towns. He now calls it “municipal welfare.”

At our local level, eliminating state revenue sharing would put the squeeze on our town and school budgets. It would mean cutting about $75,000 from the budget of Boothbay Harbor and almost $96,000 from Boothbay. It is a bigger number for Wiscasset, $190,000.

Our friends in the state legislature are now wrestling with this revenue sharing question. The towns are pushing back. So are some legislators. No one knows what will happen.

The folks in Augusta are playing the old shell game. They don’t want to raise taxes, so they are trying to solve the current budget crisis by getting someone else to pay the bill.

And, dear readers, that someone is you.