In Morristown: Third budget proposed, library ask nixed

For some, like the town library, even then might be too late.

The new proposed budget, adopted by the selectboard last Thursday, rings in at $9.2 million, which knocks $900,000 off the original $10.1 million spending figure that voters defeated by a three-to-one margin on Town Meeting Day in March. It is $220,000 smaller than a second budget that was defeated two-to-one on June 6.

Once again, the budget spares town employees, keeping intact across-the-board salary increases of 8 percent or higher and adding personnel to the payroll.

Taxpayers are being asked to shoulder a proportionately smaller amount than in previous budget iterations, with property taxes responsible for funding roughly $7.8 million of the overall spending — a figure that includes $414,000 in extra spending that Town Meeting Day voters directly approved, even as they sank the big operating budget.

Instead of cutting salaries, the selectboard opted to dip even further into its rainy-day fund, using $340,000 from the reserves that are replenished each year with any surplus.

Board vice chair Don McDowell said the new budget represents a 9.7 percent increase in the amount due from taxpayers, compared to this year, but does not take into consideration the robust growth in the town’s grand list — the sum value of all taxable property in town — which he and other budget crafters have estimated will knock that percentage increase down another two points, since more properties mean more property taxpayers to shoulder the burden.

“That is below the cost of living that we have been dealing with in the last little bit,” McDowell said July 17 during the first — and lengthier — of two budget talks last week. “Arguably, it could be said that we are deficit spending right now. We are not keeping up with inflation.”

However, board member Laura Streets, who would ultimately cast the lone dissenting vote in a 3-1 motion to adopt the new budget, said she was worried that, even if the third budget passes, it won’t be long before budgeting for the next fiscal year begins, and the board and staff won’t necessarily have that extra $340,000 to pad another budget.

“My concern is the minute we stop this budget, we start the next and that’s the number we would technically be starting with,” Streets said.

Streets, who ran her Town Meeting Day election campaign on an anti-budget platform, did find common ground with her three fellow board members when it comes to keeping employee raises based on cost-of-living increases of more than 8 percent — even though the blanket employee raises are not popular with many in town, those employees were promised raises in the 2024 fiscal year.

She and other board members vowed to review the town’s salary formula ahead of next year’s budget talks.

Closing the books

The town is in a precarious position entering the new fiscal year on July 1 without an operating budget.

It’s not like entering the new year without a school budget, where the state will collect taxes based on the previous year’s budget. For towns, their only option is to keep trying until a budget passes.

Morristown took out a $2.15 million line of credit from Union Bank to pay for “current expenses” and keep the town running until a budget is passed and the town can collect taxes, but that leaves departments and organizations who are paid by allocations from the operating budget without needed revenue.

For the Morristown Centennial Library, which gets 60-70 percent of its annual operating budget from the town, not getting that could mean the difference between staying open or shutting down.

Stephanie Hoffman, the library board’s treasurer, asked the board last week to front the library the first of the five annual disbursements it normally gets — not based on the proposed budget that increases the library’s allocation, but based on level-funding, a payment of roughly $37,000.

Without funding from the town — and an inability to dip into the library’s endowment “without violating our fiduciary responsibility to manage that fund appropriately” — Hoffman said the library would run out of money at the end of September.

“Our reliance on that appropriation, in my observation, is identical to any other town department that’s continuing to operate right now and relying on last year’s budget to keep going,” Hoffman said. “Our argument is that we should be treated the same as those other departments in how we can continue to operate.”

The board voted 3-1 against granting the library’s request, with board chair Judy Bickford voting for it and McDowell apologizing for denying it.

Board member Chris Palermo said just like other departments that are relying on budgetary allocations to meet their needs — from the EMS volunteers to the cemetery commissioners — there just isn’t a budget from which to allocate.

“We’d be spending house money without house approval,” Palermo said.

In a letter posted to the Morristown Centennial Library website after the board denied the emergency funding, library director Kendra Aber-Ferri called the decision “heart-wrenching” and said the library is the ninth busiest one in the state, with an average of 200 visitors a day last month.

“Working at a library is a labor of love,” Aber-Ferri wrote. “Because we are a nonprofit public library our employees are not employees of the Town. We don’t receive the benefits of Town employees, nor their pay levels. We work at the library because we care for this community and believe deeply in the work we do.”

While some people criticized the board for not providing the emergency funding, others said the library ought not get preferential treatment over people like EMS volunteers who are stuck at $3 per hour for emergency calls until a new budget gets them a five-fold increase.

Palermo said all this angst could end on Aug. 29.

“We need to get out the vote,” he said. “We need to pass this budget so that all departments, including the library, gets appropriated and we can move on as a community.”