April 5 - Town of Falmouth

give them the ability to adapt to these changes and also take a much
longer-term viewpoint.
And I want to go through, if you’ll indulge me, a couple of
minutes and look at what some of these key factors of success are in
communities and how they’ve addressed the fiscal stress that is very
similar to what we’re under right now. And the first key factor here is the
ability to both recognize and then adapt to the important economic trends
that are going around us.
And if we could get the next slide, I’d like to talk a little bit
about Falmouth and the economic trends that we need to recognize and
adapt to. And if you take a look at this chart, it’s an absolute mess and it’s
the state revenue picture from 2002 to 2011, so it’s ten years of state
revenue. And it think what it really shows is you can take any of these high
amounts back in 2002 or even 2008 and pretty much discount them
completely. When you’re dealing with a revenue source that vacillates just
so much, what you need to do is take a look more at kind of a regression
type analysis in the middle, here, in terms of analyzing where these
revenues will be. What we can see is that the most important trend here
since 2009, we’ve seen some very precipitous declines in the state aid and
based on this we’re forecasting, moving from 2010 into 2011, that these
revenues aren’t going to level off, these revenues aren’t going to pick up.
We’re going to continue to decline at roughly the same rate of decline that
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