BET -- Let Us In on the Act

How refreshing it has been to read the column's by Bud Dealy in which he highlights the vacuity of the elections this town holds every two years for the Board of Estimate and Taxation.

In the American sense of the concept, we don't really "elect" our most powerful governing body in Greenwich. Instead they are appointed by the town's two political parties. The town charter specifies that the BET shall have 12 members and that the two town parties can each nominate only six candidates. The citizen only gets to have input via the somewhat obscure causes that the political parties put on in January of 2000, 2002, etc, or via a primary, which is a route that is difficult and -- in the language that inevitably surfaces in the newspaper -- "divisive."

The alternative, of course, is to drop the restriction on the number of candidates a party can nominate. The rub is that only the BET itself can initiate a change to this system.

The other newspaper's lead pundit, a self-described amiable hack, has a very conflicted take on this situation. He apparently feels that a change would result in nasty political contests for seats on a board that has been above politics for decades. This raises two questions: If you are "above" politics, where are you? The only competitive elections that are held in this country are political (meaning in this context, inter-party) in nature. The second question is: Has the board, in fact, been above politics? Readers of the Greenwich Time recently learned that for many years the Republican members have regularly huddled in a private caucus before participating in public meetings of the BET. That alone would suggest a partisan undertone. But readers further learned that the only non-BET member permitted in the huddle has been the Chairman of the Republican Town Committee. Now shouldn't the above-politics crowd go ballistic? Apparently not. It appears that partisanship is to be avoided only if the man on the street is a participant, via a competitive election.

The bottom line on the lovers of the political status quo is that they assume that a beautiful and financially stable town can result only from a respectably set-up governrment and from respectable leaders. But they have the cause and effect relationship backwards; we are just, once again, lucky in Greenwich. And, further, we are not all we could be.