With a 5.9% school spending increase sought by the Board of Education, First Selectman Rudy Marconi doesn’t know how the selectmen will approach their own budget work.
“The 800-pound gorilla in the room is the Board of Education’s 5%. What do we do? Do we cut other areas to support that? That’s going to be the question, in any attempt to try and get the mill rate increase down,” Marconi said Monday.
“The school budget at a 5.9% increase is already a huge amount of money,” he said.
“There’s always a goal to keep the tax rate down. We’ve been pretty successful during these recession years. I think some people think the recession is over, while others are still feeling the effects of it.
“That’s a tremendous increase to try and combat in terms of the impact on the bottom line, which is the mill rate people will have to pay in taxes.”
The selectmen have budget meetings next Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, starting at 7 in town hall each night, and expect to do some budget work after their regular meeting starting Wednesday night at 7:30.
They’ll be looking at a more than $34-million budget with a roughly 2.2% increase in requested spending for town departments — police, fire, highway, parks and recreation, town hall administration.
The selectmen will also be asked to make a “non-binding recommendation” to the Board of Finance on the more than $91-million school budget sought by the Board of Education — with the 5.91% increase.
“That is per our charter now, the selectmen will be making a non-binding recommendation to the Board of Finance,” Marconi said.
With a more than $13-million surplus fund balance to draw on, the finance board will have an opportunity to hold down a tax increase by pumping in some non-tax revenue to support spending. But the selectmen have no idea how much that will be — and the school increase still looks tall.
“We don’t know what the Board of Finance will be doing relative to the use of fund balance. We can make some guesses. They don’t like us to do that. But without that, the tax increase is substantial,” Marconi said.
What kind of a tax rate increase is projected?
“With the town at 2.2% and the Board of Education at 5.91% … it’s over 5% without fund balance, and without decreasing some other things,” Marconi said
“I just don’t feel good about that at all. That’s perhaps an understatement.
“An average house, that’s going to be $500 a year.”
The selectmen will be able to make cuts in the budgets of town departments, and spending increases such as the fire department’s proposal for an eight-man minimum shift — a change to be made in the middle of the fiscal year, to cut its first-year cost in half — will get scrutiny.
“That’s in at a cost $144,000, so I don’t know if that’s going to survive,” Marconi said of the eight-man shift. “But should we be reducing expenditures that have to do with the health, safety and welfare of the town in general so that we can make a 5.9% request of the Board of Education more palatable?
“The entire Board of Education would agree the town needs to keep addressing other needs,” he said.
“I can go through each line item and reduce potentially a little bit here, a little bit there, some over here, some over there, and cut things below what we think they’re going to need. And even if I do that, it’s not going to make a dent in the dollar amount being requested by the Board of Education — their $5.9% increase is a little over $5 million.
“If I come up with $200,000, is that going to do anything?” Marconi said. “We’re talking a huge increase of a very large number, relative to the rest of the budget.”
The 2.2% increase proposed for the town budget is in the vicinity of $700,000, compared to $5 million for schools.
“The school board’s requested budget is $86 million, so 1% is $860,000. For me, our budget is $34 million,” Marconi said. “So we’d have to cut 2% to cut them 1%.”
The post Battle looms over budget appeared first on The Ridgefield Press.