Message from the Mayor: Board of Trustees approve budget

Fellow Residents;

Once a year, it is the Board of Trustee’s responsibility to review and then approve the budget prepared by the Village Manager.  Tuesday night, the Board approved a budget with a tax increase of .37%, (roughly one third of one percent) which translates to an increase of approximately $1.29 a month for a typical home owner. This amount, for the fourth year in a row, is under the tax levy cap set by New York State, and is, once again, the lowest among our local villages. 

This is not an austerity budget, however.  Building on the success the Village has enjoyed  in controlling budgets and rebuilding a reserve fund that is now 10% of our annual expenses, we now have the latitude to begin to invest more in our infrastructure like our parks and roads.  To that end, we are planning through the current and future budget to:

• Set aside more than the typical $200,000  we allocated annually for years for road resurfacing, upping it to $340,000.  This will allow us to resurface substantially more roads, but also to start rebuilding proper curbs (which we have previously been unable to afford).  If we can sustain this level of investment over the next few years, we should be able to make substantial headway in addressing the visibly crumbling roads.  Very bread-and-butter, but what we need.
• Fully fund a renovation of Riverview Park with a $75,000 investment.  This neglected park on Warburton is increasingly heavily used by its changing neighborhood and will enjoy a major facelift and reorientation toward preferred local resident uses.
• Set aside $50,000 for other park renovations later this year that will be determined once the Parks and Recreation Committee completes a strategic review of our current needs and capacity.  Our parks system, underfunded for years, will be enjoying more attention in these years as we finally turn to addressing long-term issues left undone. 
• We have allocated a total of $25,000 for our municipal building to rebuild several of its wooden windows (increasing fuel efficiency), replace the rotten wooden columns out front, and scrape and repaint portions that are in clear decay.
• Completing a sidewalk on Hillside to the corner of Farlane.
• Expanded funding for activities designed to draw people downtown.

We’re continuing the Downtown Advocate position ($32,000), new parking meter machines ($20,000), continuing to pay down the cost of the new LED street lamp bulbs  a $49,000 annual pay-down (over five years), which is largely funded by savings in electricity ($29,500)  and lower bulb maintenance costs ($14,957,)  Some real impacts on expenses included an increase in the expense for the Police Retirement fund of $68,000 over last year’s amount (14%) and an increase in health insurance costs of 7% totaling $258,000.

Meanwhile, on the revenue side, we have seen substantial growth in fees associated with the Building Department for the renovations and new building underway in town (up $60,000 or up 28%), mortgage taxes (up $20,000 or 8%) and sales taxes (up $25,000), which have helped to reduce the amount for which we need to come to you, the property taxpayers.

A side note on how your assessment factors in here. What you pay is determined by your assessment, which is kept on the Village assessment rolls.  (The Village assesses you separately from the Town, which has just gone through a process of reassessing the values of all the properties. The town roll is used for school, county and town taxes.)  Taxes are assessed by a levy per dollar of assessed value (say, ten cents for every thousand dollars)  How is the levy set?  First, the Village manager arrives at a budget. Then he determines what portion of it needs to be funded by property taxes. The budget is then divided into the total assessed value of the Village and that yields an amount per assessed dollar that you owe (the “levy”).  If your assessment goes up (or down), you get proportionately more (or less) of the total budget.  The State seeks to constrain spending by limiting the size of the levy increase from year to year of 2% or the inflation rate, whichever is lower. This is the environment we work in.

And so ends the budget season, arguably the most positive one in years – our reserves are good, assessments stable, budget controlled, and longstanding infrastructure problems are finally being addressed. It’s a good moment.  Sincere thanks to Trustee Armacost, who is the Trustee lead on the budget process, Village Manager Frobel and Assistant Treasurer Zaratzian, who create the budget and manage it through the year, and the Village employees who are instinctively parsimonious, for which we all clearly benefit.