To paraphrase the late great Sen. Everett Dirksen, R-Illinois, “A million here, a million there and before you know it, you’re talking real money.” Dirksen was referring to the first billion-dollar budget submitted by JFK in 1961.

Here in Kingston, the proposed $69.4 million 2027 budget offered by Mayor Steve Noble last Friday was about $6 million over this year’s spending package. It will require a 6.9 percent increase in the property tax levy, about twice the Social Security COLA increase seniors can expect next year.

A few hours later we took our ailing cat, Mr. Wilson, for an exam at an animal emergency hospital in the Town of Ulster. “The prognosis is grim,” an empathetic vet told us. It is the hardest decision any pet lover has to make. Our beloved adoptee and boon companion has gone to that great litter box in the sky. Adopted when he was 11 years old, Mr. Wilson, named for the soccer ball in the Tom Hanks movie, shared our home for seven years.

Back on the ground, senior citizens living on fixed incomes, young families with mouths to feed and others struggling to make ends meet were given grim news, indeed. And this was supposed to be the “affordability” crowd.

That said, our mayor, now in his record-setting 11th year in office, can spin figures with the best of them. How he reduces an almost 7 percent property tax increase to about $115 per year for the “average” city assessment of about $185,000, would make even a fiscal master manipulator like the Town of Ulster’s Jim Quigley green with envy.

Other budget officers, deep in their annual balancing acts, will take heed. “Did you see Kingston is asking for 7 percent? We can get half that!”

Like the aforementioned Quigley,

Earlier this week, with perhaps inside intel from City Hall, longtime Supervisor Quigley announced a nearly $18 million budget for next year with an 8.5 percent tax increase. Included was a $15,000 raise for Hizself, up from the current $60,000.

Ulster’s population is half Kingston’s. Its proposed budget is less than a third of Noble’s whopper.

Quigley is a Republican conservative; Noble, a Democratic progressive.

There is no place to hide.

Given the circumstances, I didn’t appreciate the mayor, already pulling down six figures, plugging a $3,000 raise for himself into the budget. As an apparent sop to the aldermen, he also offered $1,000 annual raises. Let’s see how many take it.

The really grim news has yet to arrive.

As everyone at City Hall well knows, that “average” assessment is perhaps only a third of the true market value of city properties. The state, which sets “equalization rates” against assessed value, knows. Beware of the ides of April (the middle of the month in Roman times) when school tax rates come out.

I could go on and on about this subject as I do every year, but the political fact is that the budget, with perhaps a few tweaks on the revenue side, is a done deal. This is a one-party government, and before Noble departed the dimly lit Common Council chambers where he delivered the news on “tough times,” a number of aldermen had already signed on. Hell (on us), they might even add to it.

If taxpayers were to conclude that we have no friends at City Hall, they would not be far off the mark.

Off-Year Elections

Almost every office is on the ballot this year, what with the state legislating that most local elections coincide with state and federal races. It could get crowded at polling places Nov. 3, which, Republicans charge, is exactly what ruling Democrats wanted when they engineered this seismic change.

I knew the mayor’s office wasn’t on the ballot until next year but wasn’t sure about the Common Council. So, I rang up Council President Andrea Shaut for input.

“No, we’re not running this year,” she told me with what I perceived as a sigh of relief. Ah, those wiley Democrats, protecting their city mice while they go after those dastardly country Republicans.

Actually, I had called Shaut because of a misprint in the annual county directory of public officials which had her home address in Roosevelt Park, hard on the Town of Ulster border.

“No,” she said. “I’m still at the church on Hasbrouck Avenue.” Shaut and her husband live in a renovated former church where she sometimes gives piano recitals.

It’s been a busy time for the council president. Last year she graduated from Albany Law School with honors and took a position as a clerk in one of the state’s appellate courts. “It’s a great job, I’m learning so much about the law,” she said.

Adding the obligatory Trump hump, she said, “Unlike the president’s [now former] press secretary, I passed the bar exam."

A lawyer with a sense of humor? I predict big things for our council president.