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11/28/2018 11:01 PMWe have started the budget process for 2019-’20, and rather than doing things as we’ve done them in the past, I’m looking to change things up a little bit this year. In prior years we have asked department heads to hold spending flat in order to hold the line on taxes. While that has helped, we can’t keep doing that without there being unintended consequences. Our town facilities, including Town Campus and Memorial Town Hall, have issues that need to be dealt with. Some of them are dealt with in the capital budget, but others are maintenance issues that come from our operating budget. I’m recommending strategic increases in certain department budgets to give them the ability to address problems that have developed over the years. I’m trying to address these increases in two ways.
The first is more accurately estimating and recognizing anticipated revenues. By doing this, we can increase departmental budgets without going to the taxpayers for more money. One example is that our building permit fees always come in higher than anticipated, so we are going to increase our projections for those as we increase the budget for certain departmental needs. The same goes for our health department. By bringing this department up to state standards for permitting and licensing, we are able to fund the needed services they provide.
Last year’s town budget came in $2,000 below the prior year’s budget. We did that to try to hold taxes down despite an increase in the school budget. This year we have an opportunity with Island Avenue School closing. While we are still awaiting the projected savings, we know that we will not see an increase similar to those in the past several years, and those savings can be used to address deficiencies we’ve had on the town side over the past several years.
While we have made progress over the past three years on improving roads and related infrastructure, we need to make up for years when we didn’t do enough. Our paving schedule continues in spite of weather-related issues this summer (you can’t pave in the rain) and in the past two years we’ve cleaned almost 50 percent of the catch basins in town, a job that was long overdue. When we finish the rest of them, we’ll keep to the program and save money in the future by keeping them clean, since it’s cheaper to clean cleaner ones. We’ll also continue our other infrastructure-related projects to get our town back in shape.