Bethel — Amid calls to maintain Bethel’s momentum as a community on the upswing, voters at Town Meeting on Tuesday agreed with relatively little debate to contribute $1.75 million in property taxes to non-school expenses.

During the Bethel School District meeting on Tuesday night, voters approved without debate the district’s request for $5.3 million in property taxes toward education. Out of about 100 minutes of discussion of how and whether to spend the amount that town officials were seeking, the Town Meeting gathering of some 170 voters in the Whitcomb High School gym spent more time on the Recreation Committee’s request for $30,000 toward construction of a skating and skateboard park than on the operating budget of $1.5 million. The question ultimately went to a paper ballot before winning approval, 145-26.

Town officials estimate that the total municipal spending package of $1.76 million — about $100,000 more than the current fiscal year — would raise the non-school rate of property taxes by about 5 cents per $100 of valuation.

Voters also briefly debated the Selectboard’s request to create a capital improvements fund, starting with an inaugural contribution of $50,000 from property taxes. While former Selectman Neal Fox decried the proposal as “a Selectboard slush fund” for future road projects, a voice vote ultimately approved the spending after board Chairman Carl Russell described it as a way for the board to prepare to meet long-term needs.

Citing the success of the Bethel Revitalization Initiative, including the Bethel University continuing education program, resident Davis Dimock said that the town needs to keep building on its “social capital.”

“Bethel is on a roll,” Dimock concluded. “We’re doing this really well.”

In from-the-floor voting, townspeople re-elected Bethel’s newest selectman, Chris Jarvis, to a two-year term, elected local handyman Paul Vallee to replace incumbent Selectwoman Lisa Hill, who declined to seek another three-year term, and unanimously elected Maurice Brigham, who had been appointed to the Selectboard last spring, to complete a term that ends in 2018.

During the school-district meeting Tuesday night, voters re-elected incumbents David Eddy Jr. and Nancy Cyphers to the Bethel School Board. Eddy, the current chairman, won a three-year term in a voice vote from the floor, while Cyphers, a retired veteran teacher, received a two-year stint via a paper ballot, 70-41 over Rodney Rainville.

Voters at the school meeting approved an operating budget of $5.3 million, about $300,000 less than the current fiscal year. In the school portion of the town report, school officials estimate that the homestead tax rate would rise about 3 cents per $100 of assessed valuation. Tuesday night’s decision comes about a month before Bethel, Royalton and Rochester vote on a proposal to merge into a new White River Unified School District, under which each town would continue to run schools housing students in pre-kindergarten through grade 5, while all sixth- to eighth-graders would attend middle school in Bethel.

In crafting the 2017-2018 budget, Bethel’s school board put off for at least a year the school administration’s requests for money to hire teachers for a pre-kindergarten program and to hire one science teacher for expanding an outdoor education program.