Taxpayer advocate Ed Tyrrell was the only member of the public to speak to the Board of Finance budget hearing.
One voice asking that taxes be held down was the only comment from the public at a sparsely attended budget hearing conducted by the Board of Finance on Wednesday night, March 26.
“Use enough fund balance to have the tax increase be below 1% and maybe even next to nothing at all,” said Ed Tyrrell.
The budgets passed on to the finance board by the school board and selectmen would require about a 1.8% tax increase if no money from the town’s roughly $12 million surplus fund balance were used to keep taxes down.
Finance Board Chairman Dave Ulmer had explained that since there’s is usually a year-end annual surplus to add to multi-year fund balance total, the finance board has made a practice of “returning” some the money to the taxpayers by using an appropriation from fund balance — often $1 million or more — as revenue, thereby lowering the size of the tax increase needed to support the budget.
There were about 20 people in East Ridge Middle School auditorium as presentations on the $131.5 million combined town and school budget proposal were made by Schools Superintendent Deborah Low, First Selectman Rudy Marconi and Mr. Ulmer. But many of the people there were town and school employees, who may have attending to answer any questions about their departments’ budgets.
Mr. Tyrrell, a regular in the audience for town board meetings, said after the hearing that he’d counted only six people there who weren’t town or school employees.
Mr. Ulmer, the finance board chairman, was philosophical about the turnout.
“You’d think people are happy with the budgets presented to them,” he said.
“It is a little disappointing to not have a lot of people’s input. We haven’t seen this light a turnout in years.”
The selectmen proposed a budget of $33,282,000 for town departments — police, fire, highway — an increase of 2.97% over the current year’s budget.
The Board of Education is seeking $85,245,000, a 2.86% increase.
The school budget proposes some staff increases, pushing it’s total to nearly 700 counting, teachers, administrators, paraprofessionals, technicians, secretaries, custodians and the like.
The personnel additions include: two “elementary supervisors” who would act sort of like shared assistant principals for the six elementary schools; two psychologists (one to be shared by the two middle schools, one to be shared by the high school and alternative high school); a application specialist for the technology department; 2.7 teaching and 5.85 paraprofessional positi
ons in special education; and a net of just under one full time classroom teaching position, with the high school adding 1.1, the middle schools added 2.6 and the elementary schools going down 2.8 teaching positions.
In his comments Mr. Tyrrell played upon the fact that the selectmen didn’t approve any requests for more workers town departments, but the school board proposes increasing staff,
“If you have senior citizens visit you or you host your children’s sports team, don’t worry if somebody has a heart attack or an accident and needs an ambulance. While we may not have any new fire and EMS personnel, you can be comforted knowing we will have to additional principals in our elementary schools supervise a shrinking number of elementary students,” he said.
