We attended tonight’s town council meeting specifically to hear The McLellan budget discussion, which was not all that lively or informative.
But we did hear a brief summary of the upcoming budget outlook from Mr. Interim Manager John Eldridge.
If we heard him correctly, here’s where we are at the moment. As things stand right now, we’re looking at an 8% increase in the property tax rate. That’s assuming that $1 million is taken out of our reserves to soften the blow. Without that, the increase would be 11%.
The good news, if you believe the more we spend the better, is that this is just on the municipal side. So you can add to that the increase requested by the School Department, whatever that turns out to be.
And we expect it to be sizable, for any number of reasons. Number one, “because it’s in their nature.”
To be fair, Mr. IM did say something like “nobody expects this to be where we end up,’' but no action was taken to see that holds true, and we don’t believe any councilor commented one way or the other about what lies ahead. And ‘nobody’ is always hard to find when things get tight.
So we think the best advice for now is to be afraid, be very afraid. You know how things are; we’ve got two new schools to build, and then we must have that Aquatic Center. And we haven’t even begun to talk about a new Central Fire Station that’s way overdue. We could go on and on and on, but we don’t want to give you the vapors.
We don’t know what plans you might have for improvements around the old family homestead, but we suggest you may want to lower your expectations. Looks like you’ll have more important obligations to tend to.
The community comes first, you know. And the town has its ways of seeing that you put it first.
Or else.
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