Budget Committee co-chair Steve Felton brought up two important points about warrant articles at the public hearing on the budget. The first is that the money to fund warrant articles is not contained in the proposed budget. Funded warrant articles approved by voters add money to the budget and are paid for by increases in taxes and/or revenues. Think of it this way: If you vote for a funded warrant article, you are voting to increase your taxes.
Second, warrant articles for leases and union contracts also add money to future budgets. If you vote for the warrant articles for the bucket loader, the tractor, and the union contract, you are voting to increase your taxes this year and increase the budgets for 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016. A little less than half of the increase in this year's budget comes from warrant articles we approved last year for the police cruisers and the defibrillator.
If the town approves all of the funded warrant articles this year, we would be approving an increase of $256,890. If we add the increase in the town and school budget, the total increase in spending is $491,583 over last year. It is difficult to predict what the tax increase will be because the rate is affected by revenues, assessments, and actual spending. However, if all things remained the same as this year, taxes would increase by about 1.86 mills. If you had a house assessed for $100,000, your taxes would increase by $186.00.
If the town approves the warrant articles for the bucket loader, the tractor, and the union contract, we will add $53,525 to the budget in 2013, $50,255 in 2014, $43,420 in 2015, and $28,420 in 2016. I did not include the amount for the police cruisers and the defibrillator because I do not know when those leases run out.
What does this mean? If we vote to approve all of the warrant articles, we are voting to increase the budget this year and each of the next four years. All of the warrant articles for equipment are justified. We cannot put off repairing the fire station roof. It is likely that there is not enough money in the warrant article to complete the repairs, which means that we will have to find the money elsewhere. We could put off purchasing some or all of the equipment, but we will have to purchase these items eventually. We could put off starting a capital reserve fund for roads, but we are facing paying over $1M to repair Thompson Street, Smith Hill Road, and West Street. And, we could choose to not fund or reduce the funding to those agencies that provide health and human services to the town, but in most cases these agencies save the town money while providing necessary services to those who need them most. It is also very likely that we will be facing many other large expenses over the next five years to ten years because we have put off making large capital expenditures and have not put any money into capital reserves to cover these expenses.
What should we do? Right now I do not have enough information to make an informed decision on all of the warrant articles. By that I mean I don't know what the best approach to meeting our capital needs is. Do we lease equipment, take out loans, or purchase it outright? Do we really need to replace radios that are working, or is there an alternative approach that will meet our safety needs and save us money? If we had a capital improvement plan, we would have a much better understanding of our priorities and options in terms of acquiring equipment and repairing roads and facilities. We would know what expenses we would be facing short-term and long-term. Now our priorities are determined by which equipment breaks down, which buildings develop serious problems, and which roads are in bad enough condition that we can no longer ignore them.
No comments:
Post a Comment