Selectboard FY24 Budget Update – 3/22/23

We want to update you on budget requests from town departments and our discussions about these requests. Ultimately the Selectboard decides what amount to request from taxpayers. Citizens make the final decision at Annual Town Meeting.

Though we postponed the budget presentation originally scheduled for 3/20, the Financial Management Team (FMT) and Selectboard have been making progress. On 3/6, residents heard of preliminary budget requests from Highway, Police, Fire, and Ambulance asking for increases of $146,000 (14%), $340,328 (32%), $55,840 (20%) and $127,750 (52%) respectively or an additional $669,918 in funds for these four departments. These increases amount to 5.7% of the entire FY23 operating budget. Though residents understood the justification, they were very concerned about the level of tax increases that would be needed. Since then, we heard from voters at the Special Town Meeting that they want existing speed limits enforced more aggressively by the Police Department. We have also seen a draft of the MRI Assessment of the Fire/EMS Department documenting the need for more focus on record keeping and the need to improve overnight EMS response times.

In response to what we have heard and learned; a few changes have been made to the proposed budget:

· Chief Patriarca is postponing his request to add a Lieutenant position until next year. He is preparing two budget scenarios, one with two additional full-time patrol officers and the other with a single additional full-time patrol officer. In addition, he wants to add a 10 hour per week administrative position to help him with some of the work the Lieutenant would have done. The biggest cost driver in the Police budget is salaries. These changes should reduce that aspect of the budget.

· Chief Bennett is requesting a part-time administrative position which will be dedicated to the Fire/EMS Department. This position will assist with many of the tasks identified in the MRI assessment. The biggest driver in the Fire/EMS Department’s proposed budget increase is the cost of having one EMT or Medic in the station from 5pm-7am, 365 days a year. Though we don’t have many ambulance calls overnight (maybe 50), when we do, we are quite often unable to provide an adequate response time and usually resort to using mutual aid. Residents will need to make the very personal decision about whether they want to spend approximately $128,000 to provide a more rapid response and possibly save lives.

· The Highway Department’s road maintenance budget will be reduced by $100,000 to the level it was at last year. The department continues to be eligible for many grant programs.

We recently received an updated Compensation and Classification Review from the Collins Center. They did a salary survey to compare Princeton’s compensation levels against other areas municipalities. Town Administrator Sherry Patch is working with department heads to develop a proposal to update the budgeted wages. Our goal is to bring wages into line with the targets suggested by the Collins Center. We are concerned about losing employees if we do not pay competitive wages.

Part of the budget discussions has been how to use ARPA funds. The FMT wanted to allocate the remainder of the ARPA funds to the new public safety building since that was the top priority of residents when they were surveyed about how we should use the funds. However, we are concerned that the funds would expire before we could use them for the building. The team proposes using the remaining ARPA funds for a few of the large capital items (replace ambulance $393k, replace fire turnout gear $30k, security system for TPS $50, and a generator for the Highway fuel pump $28k) and transferring a similar amount from either free cash or the “sale of town owned land” funds into the public safety building fund. We believe that achieves the towns’ goals for the ARPA funds. To see a list of ARPA fund allocation to date, see the Selectboard’s Projects page.

At this point, the FMT is proposing leases for a backhoe ($125k) and a replacement police cruiser ($65k) with first payments due in FY25. We are not proposing any new borrowing.

We recently learned that we received $100k in earmarked funds in the Statehouse budget for PFAS. We will be discussing how this money should be applied.

The Selectboard will not be asking residents for money for the new public safety building or design and construction documents at the Annual Town Meeting in May. We believe residents will be better served by holding a Special Town Meeting in the fall and taking the necessary time to engage with them on the work that has been done to date and the cost estimates that we have received.

We will be able to share the impact of these changes with you at the next budget session on 3/27 at 6:30pm.

If you would like to provide feedback on or ask questions about the budget, please reach out to Sherry Patch at townadministrator@town.princeton.ma.us or 978-464-2102.