$46 million proposed budget

PALMER — It’s budget season again and if the manager has his way, there won’t be any big changes at the borough.

The borough assembly still has to take its crack at the purse strings and could increase the budget if the changes don’t run afoul of the tax cap.

Borough Manager John Duffy on Tuesday gave the assembly a peek at what he’s proposing — no increase in the mill rate, no new positions.

Duffy went over the statistics the borough is facing:

• In 2008, population growth continued but slowed down considerably.

• About 775 new homes were built, down from the 2005 peak of 1,664.

• Home values went down in 2008 by just under 5 percent.

“That’s not good news, however it’s much better than we’ve seen in the Lower 48,” Duffy said.

All that, of course, affects the borough’s property tax growth since fewer new homes built mean fewer to tax. Homes worth less than the year before get taxed less.

But the biggest chunk of the budget — schools — is likely to get bigger. Duffy proposed a $1,390,160 bump in the money given to schools, for a total of $46,108,048. That’s significantly less than the $10 million the district was asking for but, Duffy said, a bump like that would have broken the borough’s tax cap.

Also at Tuesday’s meeting, schools Superintendent George Troxel spoke quite a bit about why the budget is going up.

Under the district’s budgeting process, teams are tasked with coming up with budget packages taking into account a 5 percent decrease, a 2 percent decrease, one that stays steady and one that’s “enhanced.”

Even at the zero-based level — no new programs as compared to last year — the budget, Troxel said, shows an increase over last year.

That’s mainly, Troxel said, due to staffing. Generally, schools are a highly labor-intensive enterprise and the borough is no exception. Staffing accounts for 87 percent of the schools budget, he said.

Most of those employees, he said, are set for scheduled raises next year. Which means the budget necessarily has to go up, even without adding any programs.

Assembly members questioned Troxel about where stimulus money from the federal government will go in the schools. The budget he presented, they pointed out, didn’t make any mention of stimulus money.

“We haven’t planned for any stimulus money,” Troxel said. “There’s a tremendous amount of ambiguity with that.”

He said he’s been reading the papers and talking to officials but as of Tuesday he didn’t have a solid read on where, exactly, the money is going. There are indications the state might use the educational portion of the money to plug holes in the budget.

“Then I read the other side of the coin. The federal government’s saying, ‘Oh you can’t do that,’” Troxel said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.