North East Town Board works on 2012 budget

NORTH EAST — The Town Board started to work on its municipal budget for 2012 at a special meeting on Oct. 6. The fiscal plan was also brought up a week later at the board’s business meeting on Oct. 13, but it was decided instead that it would be dealt with at a special meeting on Thursday, Oct. 20, at 7 p.m. at Town Hall.The board will continue crunching numbers throughout the rest of the fall, until it adopts a budget that meets the state’s new tax cap of 2 percent. The board is aiming to adopt the budget by Nov. 20, the unofficial deadline. The job won’t be easy, according to town Supervisor Dave Sherman, but it will be doable, he said. “That’s what the state comptroller calls for,” Sherman said. “I did advise the board of the fact that we have growth factors in the assessment roll — and not just the one the assessor did, because the values are up. The view is that under what’s considered the bricks-and-mortar additions to the roll, [according to the comptroller’s office], on the prior year’s roll, we’re looking at an increase of about 1 percent. We may have the option to stay within the tax cap and work with an additional 1 percent.”Sherman stressed, as he does every year, that the Town Board does not set the tax rates.“The budget determines what the actual dollar amount levy will be,” he said. “The state tax cap process really is addressed toward the levy, not tax rates or anyone’s individual tax bill for that matter, but what is being levied against the tax base.”The first draft of the budget provides for no salary or wage increases. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been requests, for raises and more.“Basically we’ve seen some requests as high as 3 percent, though others have been more modest,” Sherman said. “But it’s been fairly steady from last year. [I think] my concerns are where other expenses might come in.”He listed the needs of the Highway Department as one example that might send the town’s budget soaring.He also remembered that a few years ago, the town was considering building a salt shed and highway garage for the department, right before the library referendum went public. The board decided not to pursue the Highway Department’s needs because it didn’t want to compete with the library, which sought an operating budget from the town in the amount of $125,000.“I recommended that we not ask for funding that year, because it probably would have been viewed dimly if we requested both, and both referendums would have gone down in defeat,” Sherman said. “So basically we held off and then we saw the economy go into decline — people were losing work, revenues, businesses — then we were in no position to ask people to pay an additional $100,000 per year for debt services on a new garage.”Now the Town Board is considering having the community chip in for the highway facility once again. That’s because in another few years it will complete its debt service for the landfill remediation. That would likely happen in 2015, according to the supervisor.“That would be my recommendation,” he said. “It would work to bridge the current landfill indebtedness to the highway garage to allow us to have that facility without putting an extra burden on taxpayers. Otherwise we would still be in that process.“We’re getting close,” he added. “We’re [practically] in 2012, with only a few years to go, so we can start developing a project and stretching out our financing, so we don’t have to kick in [more money for a new project] until we clear out other indebtedness.” The most recent version of the town’s tentative budget has the amount to be raised by tax at $1,726,233. That number is likely to shift slightly before the final budget gets adopted.