Borough reduces tax levy

PALMER — After two weeks of late-night meetings, Monday the borough assembly set the property tax rate at 8.9 mills.

Considering the budget process started with the mill levy at 9.9, which is about what it was last year, Assemblywoman Cindy Bettine said she was very pleased.

She said homeowners will see the reduced tax rate on their bills as a rebate. So, while the rate will be 9.9, there will be discounts on the bill bringing it down a full point.

“The budget is important and I’m really feeling good about being able to do the property tax rebate,” Bettine said, noting that this is her last year on the assembly and it’s a nice note to go out on.

The school district will get what it asked for — $48.3 million from local tax dollars, the same as last year. Budget cuts included laying off a project manager at the landfill and forgoing a $100,000 rescue boat.

The borough did choose to spend $350,000 to build a new snowmachine trailhead at Hatcher Pass. It also chose to hire a consultant to manage leases at Port MacKenzie.

Borough code says the mayor has to announce his vetoes before the next scheduled meeting. Since the borough assembly was scheduled to meet Tuesday, Mayor Larry DeVilbiss had all of a day to decide what pieces he wanted to cut.

He came back with 13, according to a borough press release. The assembly chose to override eight of those.

One of the vetoes that stood was $200,000 that would have paid for trails. Another would have paid $20,000 for the Youth Court program and a third would have spent $15,000 on a viewing tower at Reflections Lake.

One of the ones that failed was DeVilbiss’ long-promised attempt to deny matching funds for state grants for local nonprofits like the Red Cross, the Palmer Senior Center and the Food Pantry of Wasilla.

As the assembly moved into deliberating the budget, a number of members promised to oppose that move. Bettine said the override was unanimous.

Another override came to the borough’s block grants to municipalities. Palmer will get $59,227, Wasilla $72,089 and Houston $25,000. Block grants are generally used for libraries.

Despite the cuts, some departments will add services. Most notably, the Department of Emergency Services has money for six full-time paramedics.

“The plan is to split them up onto two vehicles,” Emergency Services Director Dennis Brodigan said. “Partnered with an on-call responder we can have two vehicles on that have 24-hour coverage seven days a week.”

Right now, he said, the borough has paramedics but they’re all on-call. Bettine said the system has gotten expensive for the borough. She said the borough is like the ambulance service farm team for the rest of the state. Responders get trained here to the same level as responders in other municipalities. Many later leave for full-time employment with private services or in Anchorage or Fairbanks.

“That’s very expensive for our borough residents to keep doing all the training for Anchorage, essentially,” Bettine said.

Brodigan said that having these ambulances at the ready will greatly increase the likelihood that a paramedic will show up on any given call in the borough’s core area — the areas around Palmer, Wasilla, Meadow Lakes and Big Lake, which generate 82 percent of medical calls. The eventual goal is to have paramedics on every borough call.

He said a healthy percentage of the money to fund the positions will come from better-than-expected revenue from ambulance fees.

“The rest we’ll take out of operating budget, but it’s very low as opposed to what it would cost to cover the whole thing,” he said.

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