While Tuesday night’s (Feb. 13) Board of Finance saw some disagreement between members regarding its planned public survey, all were in sober agreement that the two current operating budget proposals under consideration — Board of Education and Board of Selectmen — are simply too high for the residential tax increases they would demand.
“These are crazy numbers. This is really high,” BOF Chair Matthew Raimondi said, with a 6.1% mill rate increase on the table if the numbers aren’t trimmed back.
“There’s a consensus, I think, in what all of us are saying,” he said, noting it would be the biggest tax increase in perhaps two decades, with some residents being hit for increases of 11% and more.
“No way,” he said. “We will not do that to our residents.”
Last November, the BOF gave the school and selectmen boards guidance that it hoped to keep the mill rate down to a 4% increase, and indirectly asked each board to do its part in maintaining low numbers.
While he didn’t have a complete — nor completely accurate — set of numbers to share, Wilton’s Town Administrator Matthew Knickerbocker told the BOF that the recently completed revaluation has found that residential property assessments have risen 35.4%, and that commercial property is up by 12.1% from 2019.
While he emphasized the brighter side — that commercial property increases were greater than had been anticipated — the figures still mean that residential taxpayers will have to shoulder a larger portion of the revenue needed to keep the town running next year in light of declining revenues.
“There will be some shift into residential when we calculate the finished mill rate,” Knickerbocker said, explaining that he had only received the incomplete revaluation numbers Tuesday afternoon.
The entire revaluation process was delayed last month following problems with initial numbers reported by the vendor, Vision Government Solutions, Inc., and the subsequent hiring of additional consultants who had to sort out the problems.
Knickerbocker said that about 620 people appealed the results for their properties, egged on in part by news stories published about the problems with the data.
“There were a handful of significant changes, so those notices will be resent next week,” he said, following the interviews.
He shared some figures regarding four of the 14 residential categories, including Cape Cod houses, which saw an average value increase of 44.11%, antique homes, which rose an average of 41.92%, colonials, which rose an average of 33.34%, and condominiums, which rose an average of 33.92%.
“On average, Cape Cods are up 44% … Your percentage increase would be 13.4%, based upon the 6.1% tax increase, and some people are going to see higher than that,” Vice Chair Stewart Koenigsberg noted. [Editor’s note: following the meeting, Koenigsberg emailed GMW to clarify his remarks: “My simple math was based on Matt Knickerbocker’s statements that the average residential revaluation increased 35% and that the total revaluation yielded a 20%. The simple math based on that is that residential is up 1.75 times the total increase percentage, but the numbers Matt Knickerbocker shared last night have not been fully vetted yet and exclude the personal property tax info (inferring a decrease in overall non residential property).”
While Koenigsberg said that most people appreciate the value the schools give to the town, it would come at a cost if the BOF were to approve what is at this point a 5.56% increase over the current budget.
“People want better facilities,” he said. “People want great schools, and here is the price tag.”
In order to keep the mill rate below a 4% threshold, the BOF had indicated to Superintendent Kevin Smith that he needed to keep his budget increase at least below that level, which he maintains he was unable to do given salary increases and program costs.
Likewise, on Monday night (Feb. 12), the Board of Selectmen discussed a draft budget that at this point shows a 7.12% increase over the current townside operating budget.
“I hope that the boards can find some opportunities, some consideration, for some savings,” Koenigsberg said. “I believe there’s got to be opportunities for that.”
“We’re looking at … a higher cost of real estate taxes than many expected,” he said.
Knickerbocker, who said the revaluation is still absent numbers regarding motor vehicles, personal properties and other items, said it was due to be submitted to the state comptroller’s office no later than Feb. 29.
He also spoke briefly about the newly released municipal facilities study, which has added an as-yet undetermined amount of money — likely close to $15 million — to the financial needs the town is facing in relation to some $150 million that might be required over the next 15 years to address school maintenance issues.
“These are some big numbers,” Knickerbocker said. “I think after we got the school (facilities) study people were mentally prepared for this … but there is an awful lot of work.”
“We’re kind of suffering from a perfect storm right now,” he said, noting that “reserves are low and we have quite a bit of deferred maintenance that seems to be coming to us all at once.”
Former First Selectwoman Lynne Vanderslice, who did not seek a third term in office last November and revealed the bombshell about the school facilities study shortly before her term ended, gave a lengthy public comment to the BOF Tuesday night.
Speaking to the town’s declining revenue, she said Wilton needed to get behind the Water Pollution Control Authority in urging Norwalk to increase its sewer capacity for Wilton to allow for more development potential.
“I feel very passionately about the sewer,” she said.
Selectman Ross Tartell also chimed in in support of the Board of Education, which he noted has kept its budget low juxtaposed with rising inflation rates.
“The Board of Ed has done a really good job of holding the line,” he said.
BOF member Prasad Iyer, who previously chaired the Economic Development Commission, echoed the need to find more revenue.
“We have to think about creative ways to do that,” he said. “I think if that doesn’t happen, we’re going to be in the same spot every year … Unless we solve for that in the long run, it’s going to be very hard.”
BOF member Rudy Escalante agreed.
“The percentages are very big and with the revaluation it will, I think, hit people quite hard … and it’s not just this year, because next year the building maintenance begins kicking in,” he said.
“This is actually the beginning of a new trend and I’m not sure it’s a trend we want to go down,” he said.
BOF member Timothy Birch said their board would need to decide exactly what the tolerance level is among taxpayers for the increases being contemplated.
“I was a bit startled by the Board of Selectmen’s preliminary budget being as significant an increase as it is,” he said.
“I don’t think the tolerance level is going to be at 10%, if that’s where we’re heading,” he said.
Koenigsberg noted that even if the mill rate is kept to 4%, that would still result in an average tax increase of around 7%.
“We’re not alone in this,” he said, pointing out that other towns are, likewise, struggling with higher costs with comparatively diminished revenue.
BOF member Sandy Arkell said that a house valued at around $750,000 at the old mill rate could potentially see a 15% or 16% increase. “That’s a hard pill to swallow,” she said, noting that the town had “kicked the can” down the road hoping for a brighter day that didn’t arrive.
“I think, unfortunately, we’re in a very tough spot,” she said.
Raimondi said that, unless the proposed budgets are reduced, the average taxpayer could see an increase of up to $2,000, which would hit people on set incomes especially hard.
“We need to look out for people like that,” he said, suggesting that the BOF gives both the Board of Education and the Board of Selectmen space to do their work in trying to negotiate reductions.
“But the numbers as they stand, these are just too high,” he said.”I would also encourage the other boards to listen to what we’re saying.”
It’s important to emphasize here, again, that even at the BOF’s proposed 4%, the increase is going to be enormous – it’s a question between “very big tax increase and also we massively degrade our schools” versus “slightly bigger tax increase than that and we keep our schools adequately funded.”
There simply isn’t a route to avoiding a large tax increase this year, but the path out of this problem long-term relies, among other things, on keeping our school system at a level that people want to move to Wilton for, and throwing that away now to shave 1-2 percentage points off of a large tax increase would be a horrible mistake.
Forget about the schools. They are good enough the way they are. Forget about the pickleball courts. When I went to WHS, we were state champs, had no Allens Meadows, no fancy lighting or bleachers. The big budget item each year was getting the HS roof repaired. When I went to WHS there were garbage cans under all of the leaks every time it rained and we all got into good colleges. Why are we spending all of this money on school buses when parents apparently prefer to drop their kids off creating unneccessary additional traffic, turning insufficient roads such as Huckleberry Road into a shortcut, rather than allowing them on the busses? Give me a break. If you have no kids in the school system, you get absolutely nothing for your tax dollars in this town.
“Good enough the way they are” -> yes, and this is, unfortunately, what it costs to simply maintain that. The phenomenon of Everything Getting Way More Expensive is not one that the schools are immune to, and they’ve already cut everything they possibly can the last few years, so if we don’t want our schools to get substantially worse then we need to pay up.
“Why are we spending all of this money on school buses when parents apparently prefer to drop their kids off creating unneccessary additional traffic” -> speaking for myself, we drive our kids to school because Cider Mill starts ridiculously early and they need the extra sleep. (and the bus stop is too far from our house for them to walk to it safely in the morning anyway, so we have to drive them somewhere either way)
I’ve unsuccessfully lobbied the district to combine Miller-Driscoll and Cider Mill buses so they can start at the same time; I’ve also proposed that they convert both schools to geographically zoned K-5 schools, so half the buses would go to one and half to the other and they could, again, start at the same time. In either case, families with kids in both the K-2 and 3-5 range would no longer need to juggle 2 different schools with 2 very different schedules, Wilton drivers would only be putting up with 2 bus runs instead of 3 every morning, and the district would spend less money on gas and bus maintenance, so everybody would win.