Seymour Town Hall.
SEYMOUR — The Seymour Board of Finance on Monday (March 28) approved a $61.7 million proposed budget for fiscal year 2022 – 2023 that contains a tax increase of .41 mills.
If the budget is adopted as is by voters later spring, taxes would increase by $62 next year for a single-family house assessed at $150,000.
A public hearing on the budget has been set for 6 p.m. April 7 at Seymour Town Hall.
Voters will head to the polls from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. April 28 at the Seymour Community Center, 20 Pine St., to cast ballots on the budget. In Seymour, the school budget and the town side of the budget are posed as two separate questions on the ballot.
The proposed budget includes $36.6 million for the Board of Education, which is an increase of $1.3 million, or 3.6 percent.
The school board requested $37.2 million, a 6.4 percent increase. School officials have said they’d need at least a 5.4 percent increase just to keep things status quo.
The extra percentage point is because the school board is trying to reduce an $839,000 budget deficit as a result of a previous business manager’s miscalculation of employee benefits. The deficit has since been whittled down to about $512,000, officials said.
If approved the combined town and school budgets would raise the mill rate to 35.12, up from 34.71.
The Seymour budget takes $400,000 from the town’s $6.3 million fund balance to prevent a larger mill rate increase.
Seymour Finance Board Chairman Bill Sawicki said in his many years on the board he cannot recall a time when Seymour used money from the fund balance to help with the budget, but given the current tough economic times people are facing, he and his fellow board members agreed to do it.
“It’s a rainy day fund to help the citizenry,” Sawicki said. “We are fortunate we can do something like this, but this wouldn’t become a regular thing, at least not for me.”
If one or both of the budgets fail on April 28, a second referendum vote has been scheduled for May 12, and a third and fourth referendum, if necessary, will be held May 26 and June 9, respectively, with all voting taking place from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. at the Community Center.
First Selectwoman Annmarie Drugonis said the budget that will be presented to voters is a fair one.
“This budget will help the students and it will help the taxpayers,” said. “With employee contracts, electricity, trash and health insurance costs rising, everything that is hitting taxpayers at home is hitting the town seven times more (with seven town-owned buildings). We’re coming out of COVID and revaluation, which hit a lot of residents hard. We have 37 homes in foreclosure right now. I have to think about everyone with this budget, the students, the seniors, the families and everyone else in this community, and make sure it’s fair and balanced.”
Some of the overall budget highlights include $4.5 million for the police department, which includes addition of a second deputy police chief; $1.8 million for public works; $1.5 million for waste collection; $462,000 for community services (recreation/senior center) and $435,097 for the fire department. There are also 2.5 percent contractual raises across the board for town employees included in the budget proposal, of which Drugonis did not take a raise in her pay for next year.
More information about the annual budget can be found on the town’s website:
Budget Process.pdf (seymourct.org)
