The mayor is right, a tight budget does require tough calls, and I believe that is what she did — make hard decisions before the budget got to the City Council. And now, the council is doing the hard work to readjust those tough calls, to hopefully reflect what our constituents are asking for.

As a parent, I know what it is like to make tough decisions about my budget. There were many years when my family had to decide which bill to triage or to go without. Sometimes I made decisions out of fear. Fear of not being able to pay my rent, or keep my heat on. Sometimes I made decisions that seemed best for my family’s well-being, like splurging on a trip to the beach, and having to pay to catch up. But always, I make the decision with the best interest of my children and their future at the center of my budget choices.

This is where we are now in Greenfield — we are playing catch-up on funding our schools after chronic underfunding, and we have a decision to make. The decision isn’t a unique one, our state and federal government are grappling with the same issues and question: how to fund a budget with the taxes we paid, borrowing, and any money left.

The average taxpayer in 2022 likely paid $1,087 for Pentagon contractors vs. only $270 for K-12 public education and $20 to fund prisons, while only $11 for anti-homeless programs. I used the National Priorities project calculator to find that I likely paid $298 to the top five military contractors while only $19 toward mental health and substance use programming.

And still, the No. 1 cause of death of children in the U.S. is guns — all this spending isn’t making our kids safer. Our government and many of our elected officials are continuing to invest too much in military and law enforcement and not enough on people. At some point we have to choose different priorities and make different tough calls when it comes to spending.

We keep hearing that we need to ask the state, and federal government for more funding for our schools — and it’s not untrue — but it also doesn’t seem feasible. In the last month Congress held hearings, deciding what our government would prioritize in the budget for next year. This federal budget was full of spending on a sprawling wish list to increase military, police, and border control. The U.S. prioritizes spending on military and police over any other area of the budget — while deprioritizing survival services, like food assistance, child care, education, health research, infrastructure rail safety and housing.

Sound familiar? Our budgets have chronically been underfunded in public health, social services, affordable housing and direct assistance to families in our city.

The only time the U.S. has given more money to military spending in a single year was during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This budget includes the “Safer America Plan,” which puts 100,000 more police officers into communities, and $2.9 billion for new staff to prosecute crimes and for Homeland Security grants. This approach to budgeting funnels money away from priorities that support life, thriving communities and violence prevention, and toward incarceration and reactionary tactics that cause harm.

It continues to ignore the roots of social problems and inequity and offers spending on policing, war and incarceration as the only possible solution.

Unfortunately, it’s rare that the small pot of federal funding trickles down to fund our schools and prevention services on a municipal level, no matter how much we want it to.

We are in the same process that the feds are going through, deciding how to spend our money. We have the opportunity to imagine for ourselves what we want our schools, our public spaces, our community to look like.

Do we need a new pickup truck for the police to move barricades that two other departments already move, or do kids deserve new chromebooks with security features for today’s internet safety? Will we pave a parking lot that has been sold and was promised on a handshake deal by a former mayor, or do our kids get to learn to play an instrument and march in our parades like generations before them?

The federal government has made the choice to largely divest from public education and prevention — will we make the same choice? As a parent of Greenfield public school students, and a city councilor, I hope not.

Marianne Bullock is a city councilor representing Precinct 5 and mother of two children. She writes this My Turn from her own personal perspective and not on behalf of the City Council.

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