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BasicDesignAdvice t1_j2t1ax4 wrote

Reply to comment by GyantSpyder in Healey should give rural Massachusetts a seat at the table - The Boston Globe by GlobeOpinion

> \1. They don't have enough high-speed internet

Valid point.

> \2. Less populated towns have small town office staffs that can't complete the paperwork the state requires them to complete

A problem of every state in this country is absolute shit systems for this kind of thing. Major investments in technology and data engineering should be enacted to make everything online and streamlined like in other countries.

They live in a small town and it makes sense they can't keep up. That isn't going to change, the towns are small. The systems need to be updated and training done to make it work better. That isn't likely to change either unfortunately.

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commentsOnPizza t1_j2uc5vh wrote

> > 1. They don't have enough high-speed internet > > Valid point.

It's certainly a valid complaint, but it's not like the lack of internet is because the state has ignored them. It's often an issue of the fact that it's really expensive to wire up rural areas for high speed internet. In fact, many towns in Western Mass have fiber because the state funded MassBroadband and offered a lot of grants to communities to subsidize it. MassBroadband has done last-mile projects in 46 towns with 7 more partly done: https://broadband.masstech.org/sites/default/files/2022-11/TownSolutionStatus-KeyCategories_Lit_8x11_20221201_300dpi.pdf

> 2. Less populated towns have small town office staffs that can't complete the paperwork the state requires them to complete

I think the answer to this is that there are functions that should simply be taken away from towns. I'm not talking about taking away local autonomy. I'm saying that there are things no one cares about that need to get done by someone and maybe we should have a county or regional office that administrates that. The towns can't complete the paperwork because their small tax base doesn't support hiring enough people or qualified enough people to do it. Even simple things like sending out tax bills become costly when you're doing it for so few households. Even if the towns continue to set tax rates, it probably makes sense for the county or even the state to collect the taxes. There's no reason why the town should be hiring someone to deal with collecting the taxes or putting out an RFP (request for proposals) for an electronic system for residents to pay their taxes. That cost should be spread among lots of people, not few people.

No one is saying, "You know what I love about my town? The property tax payment system!" Yes, people do care about a lot of things that come with local autonomy. There's also a lot of stuff people don't care about. We should be regionalizing those things or just delegating them to the state.

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