LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND TAXATION 123 



the method of approach and the results may serve (and errors avoid- 

 ed) as a reference for subsequent research. 



Procedure 



After the town reports of the 116 towns visited during the survey 

 were carefully reviewed and 27 were discarded because of errors, 

 omissions, or because of unusual local situations. 89 reports remained 

 for a more detailed analysis of town expenditures. This sample, how- 

 ever, includes at least one-third of all the incorj^orated rural towns in 

 each of the ten counties. 



In order to construct comparable statements and to obtain the lo- 

 cal current outlays, it was necessary to compute net receipts and net 

 expenditures. In addition to adjusting individual items, the long- list 

 of receipt and expenditure items as prescribed for the uniform classifi- 

 cation were reclassified in order to reduce the number of classes and 

 thereby make the analysis less cumbersome, but none the less accu- 

 rate. Taxes collected by the town and paid over to other units of gov- 

 ernment are included here as a part of town expenditures or payments. 

 State aid money is omitted because we are particularly concerned here 

 with only those items which enter into the local tax rate. State and 

 local officials quite generally follow this procedure. Although the 

 school district is a minor civil division separate from the town, its area 

 is generally coterminous with that of the rural town. The distinction 

 between the town and the school district is largely one of function and 

 of fiscal administration. In any event, one of the functions of local 

 government is public education regardless of who administers it. The 

 county tax is largely for welfare expenditures, a large part of which 

 was at one time a town responsibility. 



The populous sections in ten of the 89 towns are organized into 

 precincts or village districts each having a tax rate higher than the 

 town tax rate in the remainder of the town. The precinct tax rate is 

 essentially the town rate plus a rate sufificient to meet the net costs of 

 the services for which the district was organized. For example, omit- 

 ting the precinct tax from town expenditures of these ten towns would 

 show a relatively small outlay for fire protection compared to the rest 

 of the towns studied. As a matter of fact, the ten towns with pre- 

 cincts average much larger in population and taxable wealth. The net 

 costs of the services provided by precincts were computed and 

 charged to similar services of the towns in order to make the costs of 

 these functions comparable to those of towns which have no pre- 

 cincts. For this reason, precinct taxes do not appear as such in the 

 subsequent analysis. 



The final grouping of expenditure items, as adjusted, is shown in 

 Table 1 with the total amount of each item, the average amount per 

 town, and the percentage that each item is of the total. The 89 towns 

 had net expenditures of approximately 2.5 million dollars, or $27,925 

 per town. Slightly less than one-seventh of the revenue for meeting 

 these expenditures was obtained from sources other than the property 

 tax. The remainder of the expenditures represents the amount neces- 



