Newport
At Tuesday’s deliberative session, the petition article, which was not backed by the Selectboard or Budget Advisory Committee, was amended to $1 by resident Bert Spaulding Sr.
In making the amendment, Spaulding said the problem of who would pay for the lights and who would put them up had been solved by Town Manager Hunter Rieseberg.
After the one-hour deliberative session attended by about two dozen residents along with several town officials, Rieseberg said the simplest solution to what was becoming a controversy was for the town to take over.
“We will just step up and use our own staff,” Rieseberg said.
The Christmas display was paid for by the town until last year with the money going to the Chamber of Commerce to organize the work. This past Christmas, the Chamber had to pay for the lights out of its own budget and said it could not do that again this year, so a petition article was presented.
The amendment was approved by a show of hands. Rieseberg said the town’s building and grounds department will be in charge of putting up the lights and decorations, maintaining them and taking them down.
The 13-article warrant generated little discussion and just a few questions from the public. The only other article to be amended was for the Coon Brook Road Bridge project.
Recent engineering work revealed the need for some abutment work and the article for the project was amended from $550,000 to $720,000. The town’s portion will be $144,000, bonded for either 10 or 20 years, and the state will pay $576,000.
Finance Director Paul Brown said the first payment on the bond is expected in the 2019-20 budget year and will have a tax rate impact of either three or four cents, depending on the length of the borrowing.
The $10 million budget proposal represents an increase of $483,000 from this year but only an additional $129,000 in additional tax dollars because of an increase in non-tax revenue. The budget would add 26 cents to the tax rate.
“We have done our very best to keep the tax impact at zero but unfortunately this year, costs are catching up with us,” Selectboard Chairman Jeff Kessler said.
The rest of the warrant, including four-year contracts for police and public works employees, money for capital reserve funds and the public bus service run by Southwestern Community Services, were quickly adopted without comment.
The Town Meeting vote on the warrant is May 9.
Patrick O’Grady can be reached at pogclmt@gmail.com
