Town Meeting will be held at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, March 5, in the small gymnasium at the Royalton campus of the White River Valley Unified District School. The annual meeting of the White River Valley Unified School District will be held at the same location at 6 p.m. on Monday, March 4.
ROYALTON — Residents will vote on two contested Selectboard races as longtime Selectman Larry Trottier chairs his last meeting.
Trottier, owner of farm equipment supplier L.F. Trottier & Sons, is stepping down from the Selectboard after 15 years, including 13 as chairman.
“I’ll be 75 in June, and I had two or three projects I was interested in seeing through and they got done,” Trottier said of his decision not to seek another term.
“It takes a lot of time, and I’d like to travel a little and spend time up at the camp,” he said earlier this week after returning from a 68-mile snowmobiling trip during one of the coldest days of the season.
Trottier counts the new town offices built in 2014 and last year’s Oxbow Road widening and repair project as well as equipping the highway department among the hallmarks of which he is most proud. But he won’t necessarily miss the late nights.
Trottier estimates he only has “missed maybe five” out of some 360 selectboard meetings.
“They told me it would be only twice a month,” Trottier laughed, recalling what he was told when he was first elected in 2004.
Proposed general fund expenditures for the fiscal year beginning July 1 are increasing $79,800, or 7 percent, to $1.27 million. But the amount required for the general fund to be raised from taxes, $1.13 million, is actually $4,521 less than last year, according to the warning.
Proposed highway spending is increasing 10 percent to $1.04 million, and the amount required in taxes is going up 23 percent, to $794,000, from the current budget.
As a result, if the budget is approved at Town Meeting, property owners in Royalton are expected to pay an additional 5.5 cents per $100 of assessed valuation, or $138 more per year on a home assessed at $250,000, according to Trottier.
“We have 71 miles of highways we are responsible for. We have five trucks and five men that take care of it all,” Trottier said. “Salt has gone up $10 per ton. Sand. Truck maintenance. I cringe at how much of it is going up.”
For example, the expenditures for salt and gravel each have jumped $11,000, while highway department labor operations — driven by higher wages, medical insurance and retirement expenses — are increasing $30,000 over last year.
Increases in the general fund budget are being driven, in part, by requests for new air packs for firefighters; capital improvement funds for a grant match to repair the sidewalks on the business block; and money for a new police vehicle as well as a funding increase request from the library.
Trottier’s three-year seat is being contested by Phoebe Preston and Bob Slattery.
Preston, who moved to South Royalton from Tunbridge five years ago, said that with her family’s youngest now off to college, it “felt like this was a good opportunity to give back to the community.”
The skill required in her job as a senior planner at glassmaker Simon Pearce “translates well” in the kind of work expected on the Selectboard, Preston said.
Slattery, a retired Boston architect who has lived in South Royalton for 26 years, said his previous stints on the town’s Planning Commission as well as appearing before “countless public boards” during his career with a major architecture firm is a good background for the Selectboard.
“We have a number of building projects, and given my expertise, this would be a good time to help out,” Slattery said.
Selectboard member Gidget Lyman, the South Royalton emergency coordinator who was first elected in 2017 to fill the seat vacated by Joan Goldstein, is being challenged for her two-year seat by Tim Murphy.
Murphy, who lives in South Royalton and formerly served as chairman of the Royalton School Board, where he was a vocal opponent against school consolidation, said he had been approached by members of the community who urged him to run.
A teacher of construction trades and management at Randolph Technical Career Center, Murphy said his knowledge of the building industry will help him guide the town on the renovation of the library and helping to bring buildings into ADA compliance.
“I’ve been asked (to run) multiple times,” said Murphy, a more than 30-year resident of the town. “I’m just not putting up signs.”
The school side will be different than in the past for Royalton residents for the second consecutive year now that the former Royalton school district has merged with neighboring Bethel under Act 46 to form the White River Valley Unified School District.
Voters will be asked to approve a proposed school budget of $11.8 million, up $210,000, or 1.8 percent, from the $11.6 million adopted last year.
If approved, education spending per equalized student for the 2019-20 school year will increase 9.2 percent to $18,304, compared with $16,764 over the prior year, according to warning.
For Royalton residents, that translates to a tax rate after the common level of appraisal of $1.60 per $100 of valuation, an increase of 10 cents, or $250, on a $250,000 home.
School Board members in the annual report acknowledged that the budget increase looks “shocking,” but noted Act 46 caps the actual tax increase to 5 percent before the CLA was applied. The increase, the board said, was due in part to health care costs increasing by 11 percent; a drop in the common level of appraisal in both towns; and a 4 percent reduction in the number of equalized pupils along with a dip in the number of tuition students.
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
