On April 3, 2024, the Board of Selectmen (BOS) quickly worked through several agenda items—even with Selectman Rick Hartenstein Zooming in from his vacation. First up was a quick review of the state of the budget.
To review, the Board of Finance (BOF) asked for the selectmen to reduce the requested budget by $300,000 with some suggestions for how to replace some of those funds. (On the school side of the budget, the BOF asked for a total of $335,000 in cuts.) Rather than take that entire sum out of the paving budget – as has often been the case in the past – First Selectman Bill Morrison proposed taking $175,00 out of the public works budget, effectively reducing the requested paving budget from $1,000,000 to $825,000. This still represents a significant increase from the $150,000 allocated toward road maintenance and improvement last year.
Additionally, they will take $125,000 from the Capital Projects line item, which had been allocated for replacing a roof at the Parks Department.
The goal is still to find as much funding from ARPA as possible to help tackle more paving. Following a short discussion, Selectman Kurt Vail moved to approve these reductions, which was seconded by Hartenstein and passed unanimously.
Once that was taken care of, the BOS had to vote to schedule a Town Meeting, where elected voters would then vote to send the budget of $47,365,444.40 to referendum. Again, the selectmen voted unanimously to approve. The town meeting is scheduled for April 11, 2024, at 6 p.m. in the Warren Memorial Town Hall’s Veterans Room.
There were more items on the agenda, but we’ll tackle those in another post.