On Tuesday, March 28, New Fairfield’s Boards of Selectmen (BOS) and Education (BOE) met to present potential ramifications of budget cuts in reaction to the Town’s Board of Finance (BOF) signaling that large cuts are needed. Though the actual figure to cut has not been determined, several million dollars would need to be redlined in order to bring the tax increase to a mid-single digit percentage. For each percentage point to decrease, approximately $550K needs to be cut.
BOF Chair Mr. Wes Marsh explained the challenges that face the board, “what the Board of Finance has to do is take a look at three major pieces: debt service, medical, and operations, and [determine] how you can ease that 13.15% tax increase down to a tax increase that all the taxpayers will approve, and a tax increase that will still provide the Town services and education services that people expect.” He went on to note the various ways to leverage parts of the budget to bring the percentage down, but despaired that “I’ve been on the Board of Finance for a number of years and this is the largest potential tax increase I’ve seen in many, many years. And it’s because there’s some things that have happened that we couldn’t predict, nobody predicted COVID and the effect it would have on our kids…nobody could predict the inflation, war in Ukraine, and other things…we’re outside the box here and trying to bring the tax increase down to be manageable.” Some BOF members have indicated that, in reaction to these unpredictable pressures, belt tightening is in order.
Imagining large cuts, such as, say, a cut of $4.4 million to get to a 5% tax increase, BOE Chair Mr. Dominic Cipollone said, “It would take us years to recover from cuts of this magnitude and on both sides of the budget.” Superintendent Dr. Ken Craw gave a presentation on the school district’s needs, explaining that the positive trajectory that the district is on will likely be derailed with large spending cuts. He said that staffing “reductions are going to come from all levels that includes teachers, admins, coaches, interventionist, counselors, paras, secretaries, tech, and facilities staff. Depending on the size of the reduction will determine what our staffing losses will be.” Craw walked through the potential for classroom size increases and program eliminations, including high school course offerings and reduced co-curriculars. He supposes that the district will reduce some post-pandemic services and that the middle school teaming model may be put on hold.
Craw presented a tiered scenario for increased elementary class sizes, saying, “those are numbers we have not really seen in New Fairfield…all grades would be outside of the class size goals” that have been set by the district. Not required programs, such as gifted and talented, may need to be placed on hold, as well as potential STEAM cuts. He stressed that other offerings would also need to be examined: freshman sports, for example, at a cost of approximately $100,000. Craw also said, “we’d have to look at the number of instructional coaches and the impact on instructional improvement curriculum development and professional learning.”
On the Town budget side, First Selectman Ms. Pat Del Monaco said, “Much like all of you at home, we’re seeing inflationary increases in the work that we do. So we’ve seen large increase in utilities and also in contracted services.” Cleaning, landscaping, and tree trimming services, for example, have all increased their costs. New Town positions include a permanent School Resource Officer for the elementary campus and more staff to support the communications department. “We also added road repair funding,” Del Monaco explained, “We have a lot of roads that need work. That’s an ongoing problem.” Del Monaco stressed that Gillotti Road needs attention this year after the construction. Paramedic services have increased to the tune of $285,000. She said, “our municipal budget increase in total is $510,435 over last year, which is a 3.85% increase. But what we did to get there was we reduced our capital expenditures, so that there is no taxpayer contribution to capital…it’s not that we have cut all of our capital out of the budget. We do have revenue that comes into our capital fund as well as some unappropriated capital funds that we are utilizing to cover the most important capital needs this year.”
Del Monaco explained that potential cuts to the Town budget would result in disruption in the Public Works department, which is “responsible for maintaining our fields, our buildings, our roads and drainage, our marina, and it would also be losing services such as ours at our drop off center and roadside mowing to maintain sightlines and plowing.” She said, “We would have to reduce plow routes which just means it takes us longer to get the roads clear during a storm. We would also reduce the amount of money spent on road paving.” She noted that the library and senior center would likely need to reduce hours and programs. “We don’t have a lot of room to get a half a million dollars of cuts or even $250,000 of cuts, anything, quite frankly, the way we’re budgeted this year. Anything over, say $100,000 is really going to make a noticeable dent in the services that we provide to our residents.”
Lengthy public comment sessions were a bit more mixed at this meeting but heavily favored requests for no changes to the budgets. Voters have begun to ask for an as-is vote, using only debt service and medical opportunities to reduce the tax increase.
By Sarah Opdahl