Assembly passes budget

PALMER — After finding money for emergency responders, mapping and a library assistant, the Mat-Su Borough Assembly’s 2013 budget also reduced property tax rates by another half a point.

Borough Mayor Larry DeVilbiss described the budget as “very conservative” and noted 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 per $1,000 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.

By Wednesday, Assemblyman Ron Arvin had filed a motion to reconsider his vote on the budget “for reduction of the mill levy without cutting departmental budgets or reductions in services to the borough residents.”

In an interview, he explained that after voting for the budget he spent time agonizing over it. The budget contains a hike — albeit a small one — in taxes over last year. He said he spent some time with borough staff and found a little-used fund for major repair and renovations that had the $1.7 million he needed to reduce the tax rate to flat over last year.

“That will get it down to effectively flat, except we do have to add on top of that the cost of the school bonds and the road bonds. Those were voter-passed initiatives and the public expects to pay for those,” Arvin said. “I took some bold steps to make reductions necessary to do that, I’m just not done. I need to do a little bit more.”

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 drive a fire truck to an incident scene 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 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,” he 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.