The Board of Selectmen examined two different pathways Thursday night, Feb. 26, for bringing the proposed Fiscal Year 2027 budget in line with the Board of Finance’s 3.6% spending guidance — one that relies primarily on sharply reducing capital spending, and another that calls for deeper trims to operating expenses while preserving more funding for long-term infrastructure and equipment needs.
At the same time, several selectmen expressed interest in funding additional initiatives and staffing requests — including firefighter positions, administrative support and other projects — meaning the tentative 3.6% figure could climb back upward before a final vote.
The first iteration of the FY 2027 proposed budget, presented Feb. 1, totaled $40,198,846, an 8.26% increase of $3,068,375 over the current year’s $37,130,471 budget. Thursday night, Chief Financial Officer Dawn Savo and First Selectman Toni Boucher presented a revised proposal that showed a reduction of the initial 8.26% increase to exactly 3.6%.
Editor’s note: The calculations presented by Savo and Boucher contained a calculation error, shown below in red. The actual increase resulting from the reductions they made would be 3.23%, or less than the BOF’s 3.6% guidance.
Savo’s plan brought the proposed FY 2027 budget down to $38,331,348, an [actual] $1.2-million change achieved largely by cutting capital operating requests from town departments, dropping what was originally a $1.8-million request down to $455,000.
Raimondi, meanwhile, attempted to bring a variety of operating line items down to what he described as “historical norms,” pointing out a range of examples where he believed proposal increases were larger than necessary.
Along with suggesting a variety of reallocations for different items, Raimondi, who served as chair of the Board of Finance just before joining the BOS, suggested both capital and operating expenses that took an additional $1.3 million from the proposed budget, resulting in a 3.52% increase overall.
“Financial Fog”
Among the discoveries Raimondi made in his review of the budget numbers was news of a Town Building Fund, which he said was established to hold rents from town properties. “Right now we have $540,000 in there,” he said, suggesting it go toward Ambler Farm maintenance.
Raimondi noted that, since the bond for a Department of Public Works dump truck, which was approved at last year’s Annual Town Meeting, has not been established yet, that the BOS request the BOF to use Charter Reserve funds to cover that cost, thus decreasing the town’s debt service.
Raimondi got some pushback from Savo when it came to another discovery he made in relation to an unexplained growth in the tax assessor’s and collector’s line items.
“Clearly something is going wrong there … We’re clearly funding that from savings from somewhere else,” he said, explaining that based on the data he found, there was an overfunding of $85,000 which was not accounted for.
Toward that end, Raimondi expressed a bit of frustration that the BOS was saddled with guess work when it came to determining its budget because of missing data from Town department heads and the Finance Department.
Boucher, in turn, asserted that much of budgeting involved guess work based on unknown variables.
“You’re in that position every year,” she said, stating they had to trust that the department heads knew how to craft a budget based on previous years experience.
“If you’ve been running a department for years, you pretty much know how your department is running,” she said.
Raimondi stressed that he didn’t blame anyone, but said that the exercise of creating the budget would be much easier with relevant data to support the budget requests.
“I don’t know what I don’t know,” he said. “There are some things for 2025 where the data is clearly wrong.”
Second Selectman Ross Tartell concurred, but said it was all they had to go by.
“That’s a perfect example of the financial fog that we’re flying in,” Tartell said.
Boucher repeated that they had heeded the requests made by the department heads.
“You have to have some faith in the senior department heads,” she said.
“This is budgeting,” Raimondi responded. “It has nothing to do with faith.”
Toward that end, he suggested a variety of adjustments that, while allowing for inflation increase and, in some cases, larger line-item increases, shaved down the budget requests.
Boucher stated that she and Savo would go through Raimondi’s suggestions in order to see if they can further reduce the budget, or potentially reallocate the reductions previously made.
Meanwhile, other members of the BOS expressed some desires for a variety of additions, including supporting the call for new firefighter positions, an additional administrative assistant for Boucher, more funds for the Human Resources Department, a dog park, town signage and more.
The BOS will reconvene on Monday, March 2, to potentially vote on the budget proposal before sending it to the BOF.