by Alex Brooks
The Petersburgh Town Board met October 23 to discuss the Town’s 2009 budget. Trying to keep the tax levy from going up will be challenging this year because the Town will be making the first payment on the Memorial Hall renovations in 2009, and it is also beginning to make annual payments to the Ambulance Squad to help with the cost of a new ambulance.
Because of this pressure on the budget, most Town salaries are being left the same as last year. The Highway Department has asked for an 8% increase in salary in the upcoming year, and the Board’s first discussion was about how much to raise those salaries. The tentative budget had penciled in a 5% increase. Town Bookkeeper Charles Guntner said the cost of living index had risen 4.6% this year. Bill Seel advocated a 3% raise. After some discussion, the Board settled on a 4% raise as a compromise that everyone could live with.
Next the Board took on the knotty problem of the Memorial Hall. The payment on the $200,000, ten year bond for the renovation work will be $23,900 this year. In addition to this, the Petersburgh Veterans Memorial Community Center has asked the Town to assist it with the heating bill for the Hall and to increase the Youth Program budget to pay for staff time needed to keep the very successful “Teen Nights” program going. These are Friday night gatherings for teens at the Memorial Hall. Another controversy concerning the Hall has been the question of whether the Youth Program and the Seniors will pay rent or “user fees” to the PVMCC. Bill Seel has been adamant that the Town cannot pay rent for the use of a building it owns. On the other hand, unlike other Town buildings, many of the costs of the Memorial Hall are paid by the non-profit PVMCC rather than the Town, and it is these costs that PVMCC President Susan Nelsen has referred to when pleading the necessity of continuing the payments that she calls “user fees.”
Town Bookkeeper Guntner said he had discussed this matter at length with Supervisor Mason Hubbard and the conclusion they came to was that the Town should not make rent payments but should stand ready to assist with utility costs if the PVMCC runs out of money. The Board found this idea acceptable, and to implement it they zeroed out the $5,000 that had been tentatively put in the “contract expense” line under Memorial Hall and instead put an additional $7,500 in the contract expense line under “Buildings,” so that there is something budgeted in the event that the Town has to help the PVMCC with the expenses of the Hall.
An interesting corollary to this solution is that the Seniors’ budget and the Youth Program budget remain unchanged, but since they will no longer be paying rent for the use of the Hall out of these budgets, they have, in effect, an increase. In the case of the Youth Program, there is $1,000 extra, which might possibly be used to help keep “Teen Nights” going.
At this point, the Board started putting together all the figures to see how much of an increase in the tax levy results. Initially it was an increase of 6.5%, and the Board started thinking about how they could get it lower. They first discussed using more of the unexpended balance to bring down the tax levy, but after discussion they felt this might not be prudent. Bill Seel then asked Amy Manchester if she thought they could “extend out” the payments to the Ambulance squad and pay less per year. She said she would have to talk to Brandon deWaal and Adam Griswold about it.
The tentative budget had $20,000 in it for the Ambulance squad. Seel suggested putting in $10,000 with the idea that the payments would extend out more than the five years originally contemplated. With this change the levy increase stood at about 4.6%, just about the same as the inflation rate, and that’s where the board left it.
A public hearing on the budget will be held on Thursday, November 6 at 7 pm at the Town Hall.