Services are already worse than you'd expect in a comfortable suburban town. Last fall, at a meeting with selectmen sponsored by the League of Women Voters, a resident of Louise Road asked how long she'd have to wait for repairs to her sidewalk, which has cracked and crumbled to the point where it's muddy in spring and becomes a grass plot in the summer. She said those sidewalk repairs had been on the list for six years. Bill Monahan, chairman of the Board of Selectmen, said the backlog of sidewalk repairs was running about seven years. Yet this deplorable level of service would be cut further under the balanced budget recommended by the town administrator.

Why? Why can't Belmont afford to repair sidewalks a few months after they break up, rather than seven or eight or nine years later? Why are we forced to eliminate eleven teachers and counselors from the school department payroll and increase class sizes accordingly? Why does the library propose to reduce its hours next year, eliminating Sunday hours in the winter and even Saturday hours in the summer? Those are pretty basic services, not what most people would consider frills. Why can't Belmont afford them?

One answer people give is Proposition 2½, the 1980 tax-cutting referendum that held down property taxes. With many costs, such as salaries, health insurance, and utilities, growing faster than 2½ percent, the Prop 2½ referendum was designed to require cuts in services or tax overrides to continue the same level of services. As a result, property taxes (adjusted for inflation) have declined.

In the first few years after Prop 2½ took effect, Massachusetts increased state aid to the cities and towns to make up the difference. Then, when the 1988 recession struck, the state could no longer afford so much help. Like other cities and towns, Belmont had to survive on less. The drastic cuts in town services date from that period.

Still, though state aid formulas are designed to give more help to poorer cities, Belmont does receive a substantial sum; it will get an estimated $7.7 million next year, about 12 percent of the town's revenues.

Some people argue that our shortage of money is due to the residential nature of this peaceful town. Residents cost the town money, especially those who have children to educate. Only about 7 percent of Belmont's property tax revenue comes from taxes on commercial property. All the rest is from taxes on residential property. We'd be much better off, it's argued, if we had more commercial ventures to share the tax burden.

But commercial development is no cure for ailing municipal finances. True, office buildings and nursing homes don't add to the number of school children, but they make large demands on other town services. Road improvements to cope with the increased McLean traffic will cost many millions of dollars. A dozen intersections need to be improved, in addition to the two being paid for by the hospital. Fire and rescue services for the McLean development are likely to swell by half a million dollars or more a year. Though Belmont forecasts new property tax revenues from McLean starting in 2005, it is far from certain that there will be any net increase, once the cost of services to the development is deducted from those revenues.

This is a sad truth that many other communities have faced before us. Arlington's town planner, Alan McClennen, said he's learned not to count on any increase in net revenue from new development, even though developers often dangle that carrot. O'Neill Properties, owner of the Belmont Uplands at Alewife, is already making promises based on revenues, provided that we agree to rezone their land. But their calculations don't consider the cost to homeowners of flooded basements and other damage.

It's theoretically possible, of course, for a community to choose exactly the right development package that would result in a net fiscal surplus, even after accounting for all expenses. It's even theoretically possible for that development package to be so benign in terms of traffic and the environment that it would be all benefit and no loss. But the usual circumstance is that a town looking for easy money is persuaded by a more sophisticated developer to accept unfavorable terms.

Why, for example, did we ever agree to cap the McLean developers' responsibility for mitigating traffic? The Memorandum of Agreement identifies 14 intersections as needing mitigation. Why shouldn't the developers pay the full cost of fixing all 14? The answer, of course, is that we were so dazzled by the offer of a "free" cemetery and open space that we forgot the old adage that there's no free lunch. As we're now beginning to learn, if you don't pay in cash up front, you pay in hidden charges later.

A third explanation for Belmont's apparent poverty is that the town really isn't as rich as it seems. We're often lumped with well-off Boston suburbs like Boxborough, Acton, Newton, Lexington, Wellesley, Concord, Manchester, Cohasset, Medfield, Sudbury, Winchester, Wayland, Weston, Duxbury, Lincoln, Sherborn, Carlisle, Dover. Like them, our property taxes are more than twice the state median average.

Of course, we know that all Belmont residents aren't affluent. One marker of economic diversity in a town is thought to be multi-family housing. It's generally believed that those living in two- and three-family houses are less well-off financially than those living in single-family houses. If that is true, Belmont is more economically diverse than those communities. It has more multi-family housing than any of them: 38 percent of our residential parcels. But multi-family housing may not be the marker for economic diversity that it used to be. Many two-family houses in Belmont are now owned, not by blue-collar workers, but by high-tech professionals more interested in good schools than in low property taxes. The poor in Belmont are, likely as not, older couples or widows living in single-family houses they bought 40 years ago for $25,000Šhouses now worth close to $700,000, and taxed accordingly.

Communities around the state have faced these problems. Some solved their budget crunches simply by passing a Prop 2½ override. Proposition 2½ was designed not to keep taxes going ever lower but merely to make sure that the voters could weigh the proposed expenditures and decide whether they were worth the price. That is the job we'll all face in the next several months.

Šue Bass