Norwich
The draft budget, which the Selectboard has not yet formally adopted, is increasing mostly because of health insurance, worker’s compensation, ambulance services and debt service on an anticipated $1.4 million bond covering fire and police facilities renovations, interim Town Manager Dave Ormiston said on Tuesday.
The Selectboard is scheduled to hear public comment on the spending plan at their meeting tonight at Tracy Hall. The proposed budget, which would have to be approved by the Selectboard and then voters at Town Meeting in March, would increase the municipal tax rate by 1.3 cents per $100 of valuation, or $52 more on a $400,000 house.
Under the draft budget, town operating expenses would rise about $145,000 from the current year’s budget, which ends in June.
That makes for a 3.4 percent increase over the current year; however, outside expenditures that include the town library budget are decreasing compared to last year, when residents at Town Meeting approved two one-time expenditures totaling $44,000 that went toward capital improvements.
On Tuesday, Ormiston said the budget’s major cost drivers stemmed from “natural inflationary measures” such as the rise in health insurance costs — about 8 percent for the town government’s total coverage — and ambulance service contracted from Hanover, which is becoming more expensive thanks to increases in the larger town’s operational costs.
The Hanover ambulance service, Ormiston said, is “one of the big ones” in terms of driving up Norwich’s costs. The line item in the proposed Norwich budget is slated to increase from about $97,000 to $130,000, or 34 percent, because Hanover is passing along extra health insurance and other personnel costs, he said.
Ormiston said that worker’s compensation in Norwich has risen by more than 200 percent over the last six years, and in this budget may increase as much as 12.8 percent. Fiscal year 2018’s increase is largely due to changes in how costs are calculated in relation to occupational safety for firefighters, he said.
“The health hazards of fighting a fire, and state statute — that’s changed over the last several years,” he said. “More things are being covered under worker’s comp.”
Finally, if town officials take out a $1.4 million bond at the rates they expect to receive from the Vermont Municipal Bond Bank, payments for the fire and police station renovations are expected to begin in 2018.
The first, interest-only payment would be $33,000, Ormiston said, rising to an all-time high the following year as principal repayment begins and falling thereafter.
The interim manager also noted that his first submitted budget, in November, would have led to a 1.1 percent increase in total spending, but that the Selectboard since then has decided to add about $45,000 in appropriations for the Tracy Hall and fire equipment funds.
Town officials have combed through the budget during several meetings since November, when Ormiston and his department heads submitted their proposal, and townspeople have joined in, too.
Claudette Brochu, a resident who in the past has called for the level-funding of the town and school budgets, has submitted detailed analyses of this year’s proposal.
In a series of letters included in the packet for tonight’s Selectboard meeting, Brochu pointed out numerous line items of the town spending plan that she said could be eliminated, including many places where town officials underspent their budgets in the previous year.
Selectboard Chairwoman Linda Cook included her own letter in the packet that passed along some of Brochu’s questions to her colleagues on the board.
“After meeting with Claudette this weekend I reviewed her questions and found I could not answer all of them,” Cook wrote. “I would like these questions reviewed by the Selectboard for budget review.”
Ormiston said the rise in expenditures was the result of an inevitable inflationary process, one that would require cuts to services to counteract.
With the increases of the past two years, both of which were around 2 percent, he said, “you’re going up at a fairly steady, consistent and … manageable path that I think all municipalities and towns strive for. You want to keep things consistent for the taxpayer. You may not always be able to offset growth but you want to keep it on a manageable line over time.”
Otherwise, he said, spending may change dramatically from year to year “because you’re not putting things away for future expenses that you know are going to come at some point.”
The Selectboard’s forum tonight is scheduled to be followed by a board discussion and possible adoption of the budget. The meeting is at 6:30 p.m. at Tracy Hall.
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or at 603-727-3242.