One might be tempted to characterize the distinction as the diplomats against the accountants, but that would wrongly imply that both approaches could lead to something like a reasonable and democratic resolution. The controversy over the third of a million dollars in Tiverton property taxes that the school department spent in excess of its local appropriation has two components: a dispute about cooperation, on the one hand, and an investigation of revenue, on the other.

It's the subjective versus the objective, and frankly, the subjective is a distraction - perhaps a strategic distraction - from a fully informed public debate on the merits.

The starkest delineation of this dynamic came during a special meeting of the Town Council, last Thursday evening. Council President Jay Lambert opened with an (overly) extensive review of the who-said-whats with regard to a joint meeting of the Town Council and School Committee, after which Councilman Dave Nelson (also president of Tiverton Citizens for Change) offered to walk the council and the audience through a presentation explaining the origin of the financial disagreement. (See clips 1 and 2 of the included video.)

Before Nelson could project the relevant spreadsheet for public viewing, Councilman Brett Pelletier interrupted to express his own intention for the meeting: "I'm trying very hard to prevent people who want to fight with each other to fight with each other, because I won't have it." In patrician fashion, Pelletier began his plea not with an olive branch of good will, but by describing Lambert's monologue as "tainted with smug, cavalier, and disingenuous terminology." (See clip 3.)

Had his choice adjectives been chosen for accuracy, rather than as a mere expression of scorn, Pelletier might have explained what, precisely, was "smug" in Lambert's speech, what was "cavalier," and what was "disingenuous." He opted, instead, to exemplify all three adjectives himself: He won't have political battles (smug), because Tiverton is his home (cavalier), and he does not want fighting among its governing bodies.

Of the barbs that Brett flung, disingenuousness is the most cutting, so I'll qualify my own use of the term with the admission that he could easily prove me wrong. Barring that encouraging development, his targets and the content of his complaints suggest that his claim of political pacifism is disingenuous, because the trappings of cooperation are an advantage to one side of the dispute.

That reality became unavoidably clear when former School Committee vice chairman and former financial town meeting moderator Michael Burk took the podium to note the high degree of cooperation between his committee, the Budget Committee, and the Town Council in the early-to-middle years of the last decade. The obvious rejoinder is that Tiverton has had quite enough of that brand of cooperation, and the adversarial turn in town politics came when residents woke up to the fact that the town's tax levy nearly doubled over those years of mutual support among elected and appointed officials.

During the hour or so between Pelletier's protest and Burk's reminiscences, diplomacy and accounting each had their turn. First came the mind-numbing spats of interest only to people guarding their own political turf or feeling personally offended that they were not afforded the evidence of authority marked by courtesy calls. Did the Town Council "approve" of the treasurer's "take-back" from the schools' accounts to the town's or just "support" it? Can the town treasurer and council president respond to the state auditor general's suggestion that the local government should request an extension of the deadline for its audit? Can the council president and School Committee chairwoman postpone a meeting based on inclement weather without consulting a quorum of their respective bodies?

No doubt, these are all critical questions in a variety of contexts - chief among them the context of thwarting broad understanding of the school budget. As I described in this space two weeks ago, the gist is that the financial town meeting approved a local appropriation for the schools and gave an estimate of state aid; the state aid came in $367,165 short, and the school department added the difference to its local appropriation without announcing that it was doing so; it did this even though its total aid from the state and federal governments increased by $467,694, claiming that so-called "restricted" funds can't be considered in the calculations; and it did this even though state pension reforms saved the district another $365,324 that it had included in its budget.

It would certainly be legitimate to argue that, even after a half-million-dollar increase in total aid and a third of a million dollars in painless savings, the schools needed another third of a million dollars in unappropriated local dollars, for an effective increase of $1.2 million. Of course, Tiverton residents who, like me, struggle each week to pay their bills through the Great Recession may disagree.

Diplomats like to negotiate among themselves and quibble in public about who owes whom what deference and courtesy, because the pettiness and inanity leaves the rest of us baffled and bamboozled. In contrast, if the accountants succeed in explaining the scheme in terms that we all can understand, the game may very well be up.