Assembly budget has help for firefighters, medics

PALMER — After finding money for emergency responders, mapping and a library assistant, the Mat-Su Borough Assembly brought the 2013 budget in with the property tax rate half a point lower than where it started.

Borough Mayor Larry DeVilbiss described the budget as “very conservative” and noted that the reduction of the mill rate from the proposed rate came from state revenue-sharing dollars. The assembly used that same money to reduce property taxes last year, but did it as a rebate instead of lowering the stated mill rate.

“We actually started off with a pretty conservative budget, which was absolutely flat from last year, with the exception of the bonded indebtedness that the voters approved last fall,” DeVilbiss said in his regular online podcast. “We started out with a mill rate of 10.381, that was the mill rate of the manager’s proposed budget. That was our starting point.”

A mill is equal to $1 of a property’s assessed value. The current mill rate of 9.918 means a tax bill of about $1,984 on a home assessed at $200,000.

An additional non-areawide mill levy of .489 will show up on some taxpayers’ bills, as will fire and road service taxes that vary from area to area.

DeVilbiss has until Monday to veto items from the budget, and the assembly can still decide to reconsider.

The money for emergency responders, the borough says in its press release, is an attempt to start to address frustration and high turnover among the ranks of firefighters and medics.

The first change, which came, according to the press release, from Assemblyman Vern Halter, adds five new positions in the Central Mat-Su Fire Department. Four of those are engineers, who can roll a fire truck to a fire without first having to respond from home. The fifth is a deputy fire chief.

The second change sets aside $1 million to bump wages for on-call responders by $3 an hour. Assemblyman Ron Arvin gets credit for the pay increase in the press release.

“I think this is a healthy step. It will allow those individuals that are on-call responders to have some feeling of appreciation,” Arvin says in the release.

The mapping money came from Assemblyman Steve Colligan, who essentially re-directed money from a program for mass notifications of emergencies to a mapping program that seeks to align highly detailed maps the borough paid to create with maps of property parcels in the borough.

“This spatial data acquisition will ensure that (emergency) responders are directed to the correct property,” according to the press release.

Assemblyman Warren Keogh got credit for the library assistant. His change bumped a part-time position in Sutton up to full time.

In his podcast, DeVilbiss expressed approval of the budgeting process.

“I’ve got to say, at this point I’m very pleased that the assembly worked cooperatively. They had their differences, but they refrained from talking incessantly and got their business done, and now we have a budget,” the mayor said.

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