Not much jump in mill rate

PALMER — After the dust had cleared, the borough assembly announced it has held the line on property taxes.

In the last of its budget meetings Wednesday the assembly voted to set the mill rate at 9.980.

Last year, the mill rate was set at 10.326 but revenue sharing from the state pulled that down to 9.645.

“I think we’ve shown people, again, for I don’t know how many years in a row, that we can be fiscally responsible,” said Assemblyman Pete Houston.

The original budget, as proposed by Borough Manager John Duffy, set the mill levy at 10.326. One mill is equivalent to $100 per $100,000 of a home’s assessed value.

Through a series of nips and tucks — $160,000 taken out of the project to modernize locks at borough headquarters, $35,000 saved holding off on buying a search and rescue ATV, etc. — the assembly dropped Duffy’s proposed mill rate.

Interestingly, Assemblyman Rob Wells, long an advocate of farming in the Valley, proposed a motion, which eventually passed, to drop the borough’s contribution to a farmland conservation program from $300,000 to $100,000. He said the move was an effort to get the state and others on board with the program.

“I just don’t believe the taxpayers of the Mat-Su Borough should be pulling this cart ourselves,” he said.

But the biggest drop came in the amount of money the assembly decided to give to the school district. As initially proposed, the budget would have provided $46,108,048 to the school district.

On a motion from Houston, the assembly dropped the borough’s contribution to $45,097,365, eliminating most of Duffy’s proposed increase over last year of $1,390,160. That increase was, itself, quite a bit less than the more than $10 million the district requested.

Houston said he was simply asking the school district, just as the assembly had asked every other department, to keep its budget static.

“In my mind it’s fiscal responsibility,” he said, noting that the though the borough had asked all departments to not hire anyone new, the district’s zero-based budget, supposedly with no increase over last year, had “upwards of 40 new people.”

On the other side, Assemblyman Rob Wells argued that education is not something the borough should “go cheap on,” especially if the assembly was trying to push taxes down below 10 mills, “just to say we did it.”

“The education budget is the largest portion of our budget and it represents, to me, the primary reason for this government’s existence,” Wells said.

Assemblywoman Cindy Bettine brought up a point seconded by Assemblyman Tom Kluberton: Federal and state money hasn’t yet been factored into the school budget.

Bettine said that with federal stimulus money, in her mind, the district would likely end up adding programs and getting used to a budget that’s substantially larger than last year’s.

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