Calls to rein in municipal spending are familiar, and they often rest on a simple premise: if government would just shrink, costs would fall and taxpayers would be relieved. That argument is appealing. It is also misleading.

Municipal budgets represent only a portion of the property tax burden. Even large reductions in town spending would not materially lower property taxes without eliminating or degrading core services — police and fire protection, EMS, road maintenance, code enforcement, snow removal, and basic administrative functions. There is no meaningful category of “bureaucracy” to cut that does not translate directly into fewer services, slower response times, or higher long-term costs.

That distinction matters.

Municipal government is not an abstract administrative layer. It is people answering emergency calls, maintaining infrastructure, enforcing codes, and keeping communities functioning. Framing today’s tax pressure as primarily a failure of municipal discipline reflects a familiar “cut first, consequences later” approach — one that often degrades public services without delivering meaningful savings.

Even collaboration and regional service delivery, while important, are not a cure-all. Regionalization carries high upfront monetary, operational, and political costs. It requires transition funding, harmonizing wages and benefits, new systems or facilities, and years of management attention before savings may materialize. Without clear state incentives or financial support, towns have little practical reason to take on that risk.

Meanwhile, the broader context cannot be ignored.

Across Maine, counties are proposing sharp budget increases, school budgets are being voted down repeatedly, and resistance to municipal budgets is growing. To taxpayers, these are not separate debates. They arrive as a single bill. When all levels of government rely overwhelmingly on the property tax, the system becomes brittle. When costs rise everywhere at once, households reach a breaking point.

This is why Maine needs comprehensive tax reform — not as a substitute for local accountability, but as a complement to it.

A serious reform agenda would focus on revenue diversification at the state level, where Maine has far more capacity to absorb growth and volatility than individual towns. That includes examining whether the income tax and sales tax are structured to reflect today’s economy; modernizing the sales tax base to better capture services and digital commerce; revisiting exemptions and credits that no longer serve a clear public purpose; and expanding locally optional tools, such as lodging taxes, in ways that allow communities to capture economic activity that does not originate from residents.

It also means aligning responsibility with funding — particularly for clearly state-driven costs such as county jails and court-related functions — so those expenses are not disproportionately pushed onto local property taxpayers.

Finally, if the state expects more regional service delivery, it must provide real incentives: transition funding, shared infrastructure support, and sustained financial backing that makes collaboration feasible rather than theoretical.

Local governments must remain disciplined. But discipline alone cannot fix a system that is structurally misaligned. Cutting municipal budgets without reforming how Maine raises revenue risks degrading public services while leaving the underlying tax burden largely unchanged.

The warning signs are clear. Shrinking government without fixing the funding structure is not a solution. Comprehensive tax reform — focused on diversification, alignment, and long-term stability — is.

Audra Caler lives in Camden and is the Camden Town Manager