Taxes will decrease slightly under a 2017 – 2018 budget passed unanimously by Shelton Aldermen Thursday (May 25) — as long as the city receives as much aid from the state as it did this year.
And if not?
“There’s no question, it’ll blow a hole in the budget,” said Mayor Mark Lauretti, who recently announced he’s running for governor.
City officials declined to specify what they’d do to in the event they don’t get as much money from the state.
The $123,308,705 budget will decrease the city’s mill rate from 22.31 to 22.21.
That means a person with a house assessed at $150,000 would see their tax payments decrease 15 bucks from last year.
The spending plan approved Thursday allots $71,470,000 to the city’s schools for next year — $1 million more than what Lauretti proposed in March.
The school board’s chairman, Mark Holden, said after the meeting that “We will need to look for additional ways to reduce expenses, but we can work with this budget.”
On the other side of the balance sheet, the budget assumes the city will be able to save $1 million by refinancing debt associated with a 2011 bond issue.
Lauretti said after the meeting that the refinancing opportunity presented itself since he initially put a budget together in January, but that the savings weren’t yet definite.
Elsewhere in the budget, the Aldermen made a number of minor adjustments to the spending plan approved by the city’s tax board.
For instance, the Aldermen added about $73,576 to the building department’s payroll that the tax board had decreased, and restored $25,000 of a $50,000 tax board cut to a repair account for the city’s highways and bridges department.
Overall, the bottom line decreased $22,326 from Lauretti’s proposal.
There was no discussion among the Aldermen before the vote.
After the meeting, Aldermanic President John Anglace declined to say what the city would do if state aid comes up short from last year’s numbers.
“We can’t speculate on what we would do if we get less money,” he said. “If we speculate on that … then they’ll give us less money.”
Asked if the city had enough money in its rainy day fund to cover a shortfall in state aid, Lauretti also declined to comment.
Anglace referred to state leaders as “idiots” for not having come up with a budget by the time municipalities have to.
“How can they put 169 towns in this position where they haven’t adopted their budget?” he said.
“We don’t know what they’re going to do,” he said. “They don’t know what they’re going to do … We don’t know what we’re going to have to do.”
