SEYMOUR — Voters in Seymour rejected both the town and school budgets during a referendum Thursday (May 18).
Voters rejected the $26.3 million town side of the budget by a vote of 758 – 599. Voters rejected the $38.2 million Board of Education budget by a vote of 805 – 549.
Seymour has about 12,000 registered voters. About 9.5 percent of them cast ballots on Thursday.
This is the second time both budgets have been rejected.
A third referendum is scheduled for 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. June 1 at the Seymour Community Center, located at 20 Pine St.
The combined budgets totaled $64,484,434.
First Selectwoman Annmarie Drugonis and Superintendent of Schools Susan Compton said further tweaking from the Board of Finance could mean people jobs and town services could be on the chopping block.
The Board of Finance is scheduled to meet at 7 p.m. Monday (May 22) at Town Hall to make further reductions to the proposed town and school budgets, in light of the second failed referendum. The finance board can only cut a dollar amount from the school board’s bottom line and cannot dictate what items to cut. The school board, in turn, will have to convene at some point after a new budget is in place to decide what items to specifically cut from its budget to make up for being given less money than what was originally requested.
Compton said students and staff will suffer.
“I’m totally devastated, we are not putting education as our top priority in this town for our students,” said Compton. “If the Board of Finance decides to cut us more, they are going to gut this school system. We are going to have to cut personnel. The quality of the education in the school system is going to go down. It’s going to get deep. It could get into athletics where people may have to pay, we have to look at everything, we may have to look at possibly cutting teachers and administration. We have cut this budget down to the bare downs and I don’t want to see Seymour go backwards.”
Drugonis said a further reduction to the town’s bottom line could mean cutting town services.
“The people came out and they’ve spoken,” Drugonis said. “Unfortunately, on the town side there is really not much more we can cut. We will be looking at cutting services. No matter what, we will get through this together.”
Drugonis said she and her finance team plan to meet over the weekend to discuss contingency plans in place to address more cuts to the budget.
The budgets voters rejected Thursday had a new mill rate of 36.6, which was a mill rate increase of 1.01 mills. A single-family house assessed at $200,000 would pay $202 more in taxes next year.
The budgets rejected at the first referendum on May 4 had a mill rate increase of 1.59 mills.
