Morristown leaders talk town, village needs

Here are a few topics the two boards discussed.

Local option tax

The trustees and selectboard were generally in favor of instituting some sort of local option tax on retail sales, rooms, meals and alcohol receipts.

Selectboard member Chris Palermo said if one were to look at the town’s tax department receipts from the 2022 calendar year, a 1 percent tax on all those things would have raised about $930,000 for the town.

Stowe has had a local 1 percent tax on rooms, meals and alcohol for over a decade, and can count on more than $1 million from those receipts. This year, Stowe voters added a 1 percent sales and use tax and conservatively budgeted for another $700,000 in revenue.

Trustee Bob Heanue said he’d favor bringing back a local equipment tax that was discontinued in 2018 he said brought in roughly $100,000 a year.

Selectboard member Laura Streets said she’s in favor of a local tax, but would prefer a method that exempts restaurants, at least initially.

“Our restaurants are struggling, and then across the country, they’re talking about how people are not spending,” Streets said.

Palermo said it would be prudent to determine first what kind of customer would be paying a local option tax to make sure Morristown residents aren’t shouldering most of the tax burden.

He said if it could be determined that, for instance, 85 percent of tax revenue comes from Morristown residents, town officials would “need to take a good hard look at that.”

If, though, the town could determine that 65-75 percent of the spending came from visitors who are using town roads and sidewalks, then it would be good money to chase, especially as the town aims to improve its services and infrastructure.

“I think it’s a really important piece of our ability to move forward, and I don’t see any other way unless we find any different revenue sources,” Palermo said.

It took threre votes to pass an operating budget this year.

One at a time

There was disagreement on whether there ought to be a prohibition on serving on multiple town boards.

Streets, who previously sat on the town development review board but stepped down before getting elected to the selectboard in March, had previously advocated for limiting the number of boards on which one person could serve. She said prohibiting double dipping on either the selectboard or board of trustees and the planning council or development review board would allow more residents to serve the town and prevent conflicts of interest.

“I have to say I was incredibly disappointed and rather insulted that the trustees just didn’t even bother to vote on it,” she said.

She was backed up by selectboard vice chair Don McDowell, who said, “Morristown’s a big town and there’s more than enough of us to fill these boards, and I like the idea of reaching out to more individuals in town to sit on these boards, rather than having one person occupying several seats.”

Tom Snipp, chair of the village board trustees, however, said he thinks such a prohibition restricts people from serving. He pointed out that when he served on the planning council, the body shrank from seven people to five and it is currently having trouble finding someone to fill a fifth spot.

“I put my trust in those boards to make the right decisions when it comes to picking somebody for these positions,” Snipp said.

Renewable energy

There was more general agreement when the trustees and selectboard disagreed on the state’s energy goals.

Scott Johnstone, general manager for Morrisville Water & Light — which remains the trustees’ primary purview — noted the state’s lofty goals of meeting roughly 85 percent of the state’s energy needs through renewable sources by 2045 are likely to get even loftier.

“Everyone expects that, in this coming legislative session, it’s now going to be 100 percent by 2030, so we’re going to have almost no time to flip the way our system runs to be all renewable energy,” Johnstone said, adding the utility’s portfolio is currently about 70 percent renewables.

He said if the utility is to hit that goal of going all-electric, it will mean immense improvements to infrastructure, essentially building it to handle triple the utility’s current peak electrical load.

“Which means every transformer, every wire, every substation, everything has to be upgraded, and we’ve got to buy renewable energy contracts for all of that,” he said. Bottom line, Johnstone said that it will take an investment of $50-$100 million over the next 20 years for a utility with an annual operating budget of $7 million.

McDowell urged his fellow board members to let Morristown’s legislative representation know of the town’s needs and the impacts the renewable energy standards are bound to have on the town.