Michael Bosworth is a longtime community volunteer, a writer, and a poet. He serves as interim treasurer for Vermont Independent Media, the nonprofit that publishes this newspaper.
BRATTLEBORO-On March 22, Brattleboro's Representative Town Meeting (RTM) members, by a strong majority, rejected the outgoing Selectboard's proposed FY26 budget. While this certainly sent a message of displeasure regarding the proposal, it also gave the new Selectboard a lot of leeway in how to respond.
That could be a good thing, because I don't believe there are a lot of easy options at its disposal. It could also be a bad thing, in that any revised proposal might not actually change much from the original.
I believe the now-replaced Selectboard got itself into a bind by a) being too willing to incur new expenditures, especially for new positions in the Police Department, while at the same time b) not being willing enough to offset those new expenditures by staff cuts in other departments. Its answer was a budget increase many of us found unacceptably high.
Some RTM members like myself are supportive of the basic outline and bones of the outgoing Selectboard's Downtown Safety Action Plan, while questioning whether that plan, new-employee-wise, may have been a little too robust.
Another big cost factor was the new solid waste collection contract. I am fairly sure that most RTM members see the need for having such a collection service, although all of us (staff, Selectboard members, RTM members) were distressed to learn its cost.
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Coming up with a new proposed budget will not be easy, because personnel cuts will not be easy, even though I believe they will be necessary if the new proposal is to be downsized enough to be acceptable.
Considering staff cuts is a step I feel the outgoing Selectboard could have and should have pursued more vigorously. While board members did agree on a bunch of painful cuts from the original budget, lowering it in effect from a 22% rise in property taxes to a 12% rise, none of those steps actually involved any compensating layoffs of existing town employees. In other words, they did the easier work, not the harder work.
The new Selectboard also wants to get back to making decisions within a long-term planning context. One example might be adding $100,000 back to the reserve fund, as a first step to better prepare for future emergencies. Another example might be putting another $100,000 toward overdue road repair.
Such moves, which logically and responsibly should be made, might not be feasible in a newly developed FY26 budget. They may need to wait a year.
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There were motions at the Representative Town Meeting to keep the FY26 rise to 2%, 3%, and 4% levels. These were all readily voted down, perhaps because the bulk of RTM members knew just how decimating that would have been to normal town services.
I was contemplating, but did not make, a motion to keep it at 8% or 9%. I don't know whether most RTM members would still think that too high, or whether, on the other hand, the new Selectboard will be unable to come up with a proposed budget only lowering it that much.
We should take into consideration that the new town budget will be in effect in the same year as the new school budget, and that the property tax effect of the latter might actually go down a bit this coming year. Thus, since schools make up around 55% of our total property taxes and the town makes up around 45%, then the effect of the higher municipal taxes in FY26 will be somewhat mitigated by the lower school taxes.
In that sense, if it is necessary to have a bigger rise in municipal property taxes than what has been the recent yearly norm of 3% to 6%, the FY26 budget is a good time to have it happen. I don't mean to imply, however, that the high end of even that range should be the new norm, as that, too, is unsustainable.
No matter what, I hope we all wish the new Selectboard well in doing their best on our behalf this coming year. I also hope we all feel deeply grateful to the outgoing Selectboard members for the extensive time they spent wrestling with these awfully tough decisions this past year.
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