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08/03/2016 09:30 AMIt’s hard to believe that we’re talking about the budget already, but with all the issues we had to deal with last year, there was bound to be some carryover.
Starting with the spending freeze in the last quarter of 2015–2016 and moving into the cuts made to the approved 2016–2017 budget due to anticipated cuts to municipal aid from the state, we took conservative actions based on uncertainty in some cases, to deal with the problems we were facing.
This was done without the opportunity to address the revenue side. Since then, we have been working hard to identify new revenue sources. Our permits and inspection fees are sorely out of date and so taxpayers have been subsidizing our Building, Health, Zoning, and other departments. We are aggressively updating our fee structures for all those sources and will be implementing them in September.
We will have also determined that last year’s results show that we finished with an excess to our general fund of $2.7 million. This is after we make a special appropriation of $561,784 to restore budget cuts made at the last minute, and is due, in part, to the spending freeze that we implemented in the spring.
Because of this windfall, I will suggest to the Board of Finance that we take $1 million of the excess and either offer all taxpayers a tax rebate on 2016-2017 taxes or pay down debt to lower future interest payments. Both ideas represent a savings to the taxpayer, which I continue to support.