Budget hike follows years of penny pinching

A budget with $10 million in spending would require roughly $8.76 million to be raised in taxes, with the rest coming from various revenue sources.

Other than the fact that inflation has made everything more expensive, there’s a reason why it’s likely to cost so much more to run the town next year: Because the folks holding the purse strings spent so little to run it in previous years.

According to figures provided by town finance director Tina Sweet, before the current fiscal year, the largest year-to-year percentage increase at any point during the past decade was 5.2 percent, and half the time the annual increase was under 4 percent.

“I think that if we had kept those increases at 7 percent a year all those years, we wouldn’t be here now,” town administrator Eric Dodge said last week during a discussion with the News & Citizen at the town offices that also included Sweet and selectboard chair Bob Beeman.

According to all three, town officials recognized last year that years of austerity had to cease, which is why the town bumped the budget for the current fiscal year — which is halfway through — up 12.70 percent.

Prior to the current fiscal year increase, and the impending one for the 2024 fiscal year, here’s what Morristown’s taxpayer-funded budget increases looked like over the past decade:

• 3.3 percent in fiscal year 2022
• 4.3 percent in 2021
• 3.3 percent in 2020
• 3.8 percent in 2019
• 5.2 percent in 2018
• 3.5 percent in 2017
• 4.8 percent in 2016
• 2.9 percent in 2015

Building from the ground up

It is not historically uncommon for towns and school districts to reverse engineer their budgets to hold the line on spending and tamp down tax increases. For instance, a governing body might give the finance department marching orders to come up with a budget that results in level-funded spending — meaning no matter how much wages go up or equipment needs fixing, the spending must remain the same.

Alternately, elected officials might call for a zero-percent increase in property taxes, which could lead to a decrease in town spending. That can be an especially dicey proposition since the state tax department doesn’t release its projected education property tax rates until December and doesn’t finalize them until the following summer.

Beeman acknowledged that, when he was first elected to the selectboard about 15 years ago, he had a cut-first, hold-the-line mentality that was largely shared by various permutations of the five-person board. He said the former town administrator simply did what the board asked — keep costs low.

Sweet said in her 18 years in the town finance office she has been told year after year to hold the line on spending, because elected officials have emphasized year after year that they want to save taxpayers money. She said that’s still true, even with such a large increase.

“It’s not like we are being frivolous,” Sweet said. “There is not anyone who works for this town who is not looking out for the taxpayers.”

Dodge said he also had that cut-and-cut-some-more mindset when he was on the selectboard. Right up until he wasn’t.

Last year, after he was plucked from the board and hired as town administrator, he went from having to simply hold the line on spending to directly overseeing the various town departments — highway, police, fire, EMS and town hall.

Dodge likens the old ways of budgeting to building a house from the roof down.

“Last year,” he said,” we started building from the basement up.”

He said the 12.7 percent cost hike going into the current fiscal year and the probable one-third increase for the next one are necessary course corrections that he predicts will one day be seen as spikes on a continuum toward fiscal responsibility.

“I think we’re almost to the point where these increase won’t need to be so high,” he said.

Selectboard members surely hope so.

“I don’t want to put a budget forward that I think is going to fail,” board member Don McDowell said during budget talks last week. “I’m very much hoping that taxpayers are going to look at this, and they’re gonna say, ‘Hey, this is what we have to deal with in a tough year.”

People-powered budget

If people think a 32 percent budget increase is big, it started even higher when the town started crunching the numbers. Sweet said early projections pegged the budget at a 39 percent increase.

She said the annual origins of any fiscal year budget begin long before December and January public budget discussions at selectboard meetings, when the town’s departments start looking to their own needs and crafting their individual requests. Then, department heads attempt to defend their budgets to Dodge and Sweet before the selectboard ever sees the numbers.

“We ask them to justify their department budgets,” Sweet said.

More than half of the town’s operating expenses — about 55 percent — are wrapped up in town employee salaries and benefits, and those wages are slated to increase more than 8 percent to match the rate of inflation.

That is particularly true in the police department, which sees 82.5 percent of its budget going to pay its officers.

Police chief Jason Luneau said he needs at least one more. In a Jan. 3 email to the selectboard, Luneau said the department currently has nine patrol officers, which doesn’t allow the town to have 24/7 coverage 365 days a year.

That means the department has one patrol officer on duty between 2-10 a.m., and yet the department saw a 25 percent increase in calls last year compared to 2021. Luneau said in recent years as many as 20 percent of calls for service came in during those hours when only one officer is on duty.

Beeman said the town emergency services department is also spread thin. The EMS crew was toned out 940 times last year, but many of those runs were outside of town, when other neighboring ambulance services were unavailable. What’s more, Beeman said, Morristown hasn’t collected any revenue from those towns, something he’d like to change in the future.

The question of how to adequately staff other town departments looms over the budget talks, too.

While the board seems inclined to hire that extra cop, there is less of a burning desire in an already-tight year to hire an assistant for zoning administrator Todd Thomas, Beeman said. Thomas has indicated that zoning permit applications have slowed down in the past few months, after years of extraordinary volume.

There is also talk about putting on the back burner a promotion to full time for the part-time recreation director.

Beeman, a deficit hawk who admits his first instinct over the years has often been to find places to cut, doesn’t think there’s anywhere left to trim. He said when more than half the budget goes to pay people, cutting just makes those who report to work shoulder more of the burden.

“When you start cutting into staff, they start to get burned out,” Beeman said.

Updated Jan. 19: An earlier version of this story reported the number of patient transports as the total number of callouts.