If you live in Windham and haven’t done so yet, please call a real estate agent as soon as possible to make sure that they have a “For Sale” sign for your house. I drove around Windham recently and there’s a plague of Realtor’s signs spreading faster than a wildfire ever could. Somebody’s making a killing producing those signs and if the trend continues, pretty soon people will be stealing them instead.

King George is long gone but the thought of taking even more of our hard-earned money continues and in Windham, it’s going to get a whole lot worse. Even my wife and I are thinking of moving and have been cutting expenses wherever we can. Next to go is our satellite TV. We no longer have a traditional landline telephone and instead use Magic Jack for $19.95 a year.

I have an idea and I am not being facetious here. I think that any member of Windham’s government – to include councilors, school board members, the superintendent, the town manager and department heads – should don a red coat when they want more taxes taken from the citizens of this town. The school unit and municipal budgets both have significant proposed budget increases and that’s only the beginning. We have all heard that the town manager is pushing for a sewer project for the Route 302 corridor costing more than $30 million, plus interest. The council has received a request to spend something like $18,000 to tell all us citizens how great that project is for the town. Hope that doesn’t pass but it could. That’s only Phase 1 with tens of millions more dollars needed to expand the project in the future.

Next comes a proposal of a million dollars or more to be spent by the Windham Parks and Wrecks Department on the Chaffin Pond park project complete with baseball fields, a dog park, walking trails and hopefully a first-aid station when we have a heart attack after seeing our property tax bills. Just in case, for those who don’t know, the state budget will more than likely have some severe cuts in it especially in the area of general assistance. Unfortunately, the cost of supporting those who cannot support themselves will now fall on the local taxpayers in town. We might as well start telling those people we will not give them anything because the people with money or at least enough money to have a dog want a dog park so that their mutts can socialize. I hope that they, along with their dogs, have been spayed and neutered.

This is the same town department that has a bus and large van that sit, for the most part, in the town hall parking lot and will surely rot and rust away as the two previous vans did. However, it might behoove the town to keep these vehicles because at the rate that property taxes in Windham are likely to increase in the future, the vans could be used to haul food from the Windham Food Pantry to each resident’s home.

And if that is not bad enough, Windham’s Economic Development Director Tom Bartell wants his office to become a banking institution with money that the TIF zones in North Windham are robbing from the general fund balance. No, I am not kidding here. Just when one thinks that the government might run out of ways to spend more money, here comes a proposal to have government do something that the banking industry can do better. Can you imagine a revolving loan office located in the town office that didn’t have the smarts to notice that a TIF zone in North Windham had expired in 2004 until seven years later? The town manager and economic development officer should have both been fired. The proposal is called the Windham Business Loan Fund. I am not going to do the research to see how many small businesses fail because I have seen so many I couldn’t count them if I had to. This proposal is another waste at best and socialism at worst with the government propping up local business.

Lane Hiltunen, of Windham, is totally disgusted with his local government.