Charlotte Selectboard looks for budget cuts

At a special meeting on March 14, the Charlotte Selectboard began talks on how to trim its $2.9 million town budget.

The budget was shot down by just 35 votes, 493-458, on Town Meeting Day last week.

The selectboard already shaved off nearly $160,000 from its originally adopted $3 million budget in February, and now looks to cut another nearly $150,000 from the budget.

The board plans to spend the next several weeks going line item by line item on the budget along with hearing input from the public before another townwide vote on May 2.

According to the town’s attorney, the vote will have to happen again by Australian ballot.

At an informational meeting prior to town meeting, selectboard members grappled with inflation-related employee benefit increases and a town garage debt service, emphasizing that the largest cost driver was a necessary overall pay increase for town employees — a decision that selectboard chair Jim Faulkner says the board has no intent to reduce, but may need some adjusting.

“We hired an expert, Gallagher and Flynn, to do a market analysis for us to see where we stood in terms of what we’re paying our employees,” Faulkner said. “The goal was to get to the market rate which we did. We were way behind the eight ball so that brought us up to a market rate.”

Regardless, residents expressed concern about these rising numbers at the meeting on Tuesday.

“These taxes are hurting people,” Rosemary Zezulinski said. “Granted, there’s a food pantry and everything else, but there’s people deciding whether to pay for their food, pay for their medicines, pay for their taxes. We need to be compassionate because I don’t believe our greatest asset is our town employees, even though they’re all wonderful. Our greatest asset is our residents.”

“A lot of the large increases were the result of a study, which was great that the town did that and found that some of the pay levels for some of the positions were just not where they should be compared to the marketplace,” said another resident, who identified himself only as “Bob.”

“I used to work at Champlain College. We had the same situation a few years ago with the faculty, where they did a similar study and found the same discrepancy. The decision was made to rectify it over a three-year period.”

Members posed ideas for decreasing benefit packages, cost of living adjustments and other budget costs related to employees, and Faulkner said the board will also looks at other types of revenue increases.

“What other town around here has a senior center?” said Faulkner. “My point is a lot of these people do come to the senior center here. If you take a look at the number of programs that are offered free at the senior center, that means to me that those programs are funded by our taxpayers. My solution to this would simply be to have memberships in the senior center.”

Although most of the meeting was spent riffing ideas, with less than a month to secure a lower budget, the board wasted no time in beginning to sift through each line item with the hopes of having more definite cuts before next Tuesday’s budget discussion.

“I do want to manage expectations, I would be amazed if we’re voting next week,” board member Lewis Mudge said. “I don’t think we’ll be there yet, it’s a lot of information to process.”