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02/27/2018 02:15 PMThe Board of Selectmen adopted on Feb. 16 a proposed $12.1 million budget that represents a 2.8 percent spending increase.
“I am very pleased, as first selectman, that we began with a municipal budget request of approximately eight percent and with the assistance of all of our town department heads, we were able to reduce the budget [increase] to 2.8 percent. I wish to thank all of our municipal employees, board and commission chairmen, and especially Mary Labbadia and John Hall, as selectmen, for their due diligence in presenting to the Board of Finance one of the smallest increases in municipal spending in recent years,” said First Selectman Noel Bishop after the board’s action.
The budget as adopted assumes the town will not receive any state revenue. With the State of Connecticut continuing to face significant budget deficits, Bishop has said that towns like Westbrook cannot on getting state funding to help offset costs.
What the selectmen had to decide was how to provide the services residents expect without significantly increasing the budget.
One area under Board of Selectmen (BOS) discussion over the past year has been the town’s policing model.
In the current year, the town contracts with the state police for three resident troopers. By contract, the town pays 85 percent of the first two resident troopers’ fringe benefits and 100 percent of the third trooper’s fringe benefits. By eliminating the third state trooper in Westbrook and adding part-time constables, the town’s policing budget would drop by $200,000 a year, according to Bishop; that was the decision that the selectmen made.
This change is also consistent with an April 2017 recommendation from the town’s Police Advisory/Traffic Authority to the BOS: reduce the number of the town’s resident state troopers from three to two and staff six to eight part-time, certified constables to cover more shifts.
To help implement the new policing model, the selectmen voted last month to hire one more part-time constable, Jimmy Connelly, bringing the number of town constables on the roster from 6 to 7. Another part-time constable could be added by the BOS if needed to fill more open shifts this summer, according to Bishop.
For the second year, the BOS decided to freeze capital expenditure requests from town departments, resulting in a $200,000 cut.
Lastly, Bishop said the BOS took $50,000 out of a $200,000 request of the Department of Public Works for road re-paving work and $50,000 from the Westbrook Nurses’ request.
Together these strategies yielded reductions of about $500,000 from the budget that town departments requests had tallied.
At the same time, however, the BOS decided to increase the Department of Social Services budget by $50,000 to pay for Renter’s Rebate program payments previously paid to low-income residents by the State of Connecticut. In the October 2017 state budget deal, the Renter’s Rebate program budget was cut to zero.
The adopted BOS budget now goes to the Board of Finance for review before going to town voters. Finance Board budget workshops began last week.