While the Finance Committee is “cautiously optimistic” it will be able to create a level-service town budget for the next fiscal year, it has asked town boards and committees to identify three areas in their budgets they would be willing to cut.
Should budget cuts be necessary, Finance Committee chair Alice von Loesecke told a gathering of all the boards in town Wednesday night, “We [the Finance Committee] would be very surgical, very specific, and look at very specific targeted items to make that happen.”
This is the second fiscal year in a row the Finance Committee has asked for town boards and committees to prepare level-service budgets. While a level-funded budget—which the town has done in previous years—would require cutting from services to make up for yearly increases in uncontrolled costs like salaries and health insurance, a level-service budget allows departments to fund their services the same as this year, while increasing their spending on uncontrollable costs.
In its instructions, the Finance Committee is also asking boards to create a wish list of three budget items that can’t be addressed in a level service budget. Both lists of three must be accompanied by a narrative explanation, von Loesecke said.
“This year, we are not going to review any budgets unless there is a full narrative with it,” she said.
Budgets are due Nov. 8. Capital requests to the Capital Planning and Investment Committee were due Friday, Oct. 26.
Town Administrator Tim Bragan told the all-boards meeting Wednesday that, although state revenues for the first three months of the current fiscal year fell short of projections by $95 million, most observers are predicting local aid from the state to remain at the same level as the current fiscal year.
“We’re watching it, but we’re not too worried about it,” Bragan said of the state’s financial situation. “The [Massachusetts Municipal Association] is keeping an eye on it as well, but there’s not that great a concern.”
Looking ahead at revenues and expenditures, Bragan said, the town is expecting increases in labor costs and expenses. Health insurance will not be the “budget buster” it has been in the past, Bragan said, largely thanks to the cooperation of town labor unions and the town’s entering the Minuteman Nashoba Health Group.
As for the specter of ballooning benefit payments for retired employees, an issue raised at Town Meeting in May by Harvard resident Leo Blair, “We are working on that, and by the end of December, I will have a report out,” Bragan said. “…It is something the Finance Committee is aware of and is eager to take a look at, and we’re going to look at what the different mechanisms are for dealing with that issue.”
