The only hyperbole Poland Town Manager Dana Lee expressed last Wednesday was with a toy sword.

Brandished as a mock promise to commit hari-kari over the town’s woeful finances, Lee’s levity was the lone amusing anecdote from his plain-spoken presentation to townspeople.

Poland is broke, he said, and there’s nothing to do about it.

And nor, he said, should something be done, beyond methodically paying the town’s debt to Poland Spring, whose tax increment financing deal was so botched it put the town millions into debt.

What’s occurred in Poland is a warning to communities wishing to engage in the financial alchemy of TIFs and other tax-incentive programs. The complexity of these deals can be overwhelming, especially in communities lacking resources for specialized staff to negotiate them.

In this case, Poland was guilty of a basic mistake: instead of setting aside the TIF money for Poland Spring, the town intermingled it within the general fund. This indicates a basic misunderstanding of the TIF infrastructure, and that town management was in over its head from the beginning.

One misstep, as Poland proved, with a complicated tax-financing scheme can cause fiscal ruin for a municipality, which is usually less-equipped to manage the tricky accounting than the tax break’s beneficiary.

“If there’s one thing to be learned from this, you need to give the administrator the resources to manage something like this,” Lee has said. The other lesson, that’s become obvious in the fallout, is that the town of Poland did not have enough resources in the first place.

This warning should resonate in towns like Kingfield, which is investigating a TIF deal with Poland Spring for the bottler’s proposed $60 million to $80 million plan, and Wilton, which recently approved a TIF deal which would return about $260,000 to a hotel developer.

Although both communities seem to have their processes down, it’s clear Poland also believed the same.

Poland has the expertise now. Lee knows TIFs from his previous post in Mechanic Falls, but even so, he was still sequestered with a financial consultant for two days to comprehend Poland’s deal, a testament to its complexity.

Lee is smartly advising patience and calm, until the town pays its debt. Trying to fill the hole, through budget cuts or attracting more development, is unwise, when the manager simply needs time to make the most practical decisions.

This wasn’t done in the beginning, and the town is paying for it. It’s all it can do.

Lee, after all, was joking when he pulled his toy sword and threatened to bleed red.

There’s been enough of that in Poland already.