Towns and cities are where the effects of budget cuts imposed in distant capitals are finally felt. Whether it was politicians in Augusta or Washington who wielded the budget ax, it is municipal officials, such as myself, who have to pick up the pieces — either finding workarounds to maintain vital services, watching our neighbors go without, or raising local taxes.

Whatever our response, or mix of responses, we are sure to hear an earful from our constituents, which is just as it should be. But that accountability gives us the right and responsibility to speak up when the more removed levels of government are making unwise fiscal choices.

I serve on the Lewiston City Council, helping to deal with local budget holes caused by funding losses, such as state cutbacks in education assistance and revenue sharing, and the disappearance of federal community development block grant money invested directly in our downtown.

We try to respond through some combination of shifting money from other programs, raising our own revenues, or simply doing without.

The problem with shifting money is obvious: government rarely takes on a job that someone else is already doing adequately (especially not in a frugal state like Maine), so if we rob one account to shore up another, some important service will suffer.

The problem with raising our own revenues is that the only tax available to Maine municipalities is the property tax, a blunt instrument that doesn’t very accurately reflect ability to pay. The land rich but cash poor can really get squeezed, while large, property tax-exempt nonprofits such as Central Maine Medical Center and Bates College aren’t asked to contribute enough.

Doing without is what happens all too often.

Federal, state and local budgets will always expand and contract depending on economic circumstance and political decisions. But there are ways for the state and federal governments to develop more dependable revenue sources, thus avoiding periodic budget crises and becoming more reliable partners with local communities.

Maine could, on mature reflection, finally embrace true tax reform of the type so rashly rejected a few years ago: broadening the sales tax to cover discretionary services while lowering the income tax.

The sales tax now rests on a narrow set of goods — many of them big-ticket items such as cars and appliances — that are the first to see a decline in sales in bad economic times, just when the state (and towns) need tax revenue most to prop up the economy and support vital services.

A broader sales tax would be fairer and more secure, while a decrease in weekly tax witholdings has an immediate, tangible benefit for working families.

At the federal level, elected officials could reverse the 30-year trend of asking less and less of the most fortunate citizens, even as their wealth — and the destabilizing financial gap between them and the rest of the country — has grown to unprecedented levels.

One good way to start that process is to allow Bush-era tax cuts to expire on the 2 percent of American households with annual income greater than a quarter million dollars, while extending those cuts on the 98 percent of families who make less than $250,000 a year.

Restoring the rates from the prosperous Clinton years on high-end taxpayers would raise hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade, reducing the national debt and allowing for targeted investments in health care, education, infrastructure and other programs that support the working class.

Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins would serve the public well to help craft a deficit-reduction deal that includes such a revenue increase. With the federal budget brought closer to balance, Washington can better uphold its responsibilities, including providing assistance to the states as needed.

That assistance, paired with a reformed state tax system, will allow Maine to properly serve its citizens in the local communities where we all live.

Nate Libby is a Lewiston City Councilor and state Representative-elect from District 73.

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