The meeting of the Mamakating Town Board this past Tuesday is a good example of what happens when elected officials see the world through rose-tinted glasses. During last year's budget wrangling, Councilperson Ted Brebbia became convinced that the revenues generated from mortgage taxes in 2009 would be significantly less than had been collected in recent years. After all, the US, now deep in recession, is coming off one of the biggest real estate booms in the nation's history. And, even though the rest of the Mamakating town board agreed in principle with Brebbia that the amount of taxes collected would be lower than in previous years, four of the five board members still voted in favor of a budget that included $400,000 in mortgage tax revenue.

Now well into the current fiscal year, it appears that Brebbia was absolutely right: Mamakating collected only $53,000 for the first quarter of this year, which means that the budget is now likely to see another shortfall. Even if the economic stimulus package leads to a boom in home sales, and even if the pace of revenue picks up significantly, there is still likely to be a fairly substantial gap at the end of the year.

It didn't need to be this way. The Mamakating council members who voted in favor of this year's budget studied the same information as Brebbia. And rather than be realistic, rather than anticipating a worse-than-expected fiscal environment, they kicked the can down the road. Now the town has held a staff meeting in which officials have asked the various departments to look for ways to further tighten the administrative belt. It is not unthinkable that, like other municipalities, talk of layoffs will follow.

This kind of magical thinking about budgets seems to be pervasive these days. As readers of this paper already know — too well, perhaps — Ellenville is going through its own budget problems: a $1 million-plus deficit having emerged after village officials engaged in what appears to be sloppy bookkeeping at best. There will be pain associated with the attempt to close this budget gap, also likely to come in the form of drastic austerity measures, layoffs included.

This kind of thinking also seems to dominate the world of high finance, as scandal after scandal reveals that companies such as AIG have been doing little more than playing a financial shell game with peoples' investments; or, even worse, engaging in outright thievery, as did recently-convicted criminal Bernard Madoff.

While no one is accusing any of our local officials of breaking the law, the fiscal recklessness we've witnessed in recent months and years is now the norm rather than the exception: towns are forced to fire workers; multinational corporations implode, destroying peoples' retirements and livelihoods; recalcitrant regulators whistle past the graveyard, burying the problem until it's too late.

Elected officials, such as Councilman Brebbia, who have seen the writing on the wall and have acted accordingly, should be praised for attempting to impose some sort of fiscal realism. And the others need to get with the program and start paying attention to reality.

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