By Michelle Kim
WEARE – New buildings and bodies are the main requests voters will see before them at the upcoming Feb. 2 deliberative session of Town Meeting,
Voters can expect to see articles on the town warrant regarding the operating budget, as well as improvements to the Bolton Field Memorial Complex, a new public works and transfer station facility, requests for additional police officers and full-time firefighter/EMT personnel, and a standardized pay-raise merit system for town employees.
The proposed operating budget came in at $4.7 million, about 9.5 percent more than last year, which was a default budget, and 2.8 percent more than the default budget for 2008. The proposed operating budget would have a property tax impact of $2.25 per $1,000 of assessed property value.
Town Administrator Fred Ventresco said this operating budget is similar to last year’s proposed budget.
“Both years the board has tried to hold the line as much as possible. If you see increases, it’s mainly for fuel and necessities,” he said. “It’s really bread and butter issues.”
Among approximately 41 articles on the warrant, seven deal with zoning ordinance changes, four assign land parcels to conservation commission care and four are petitioned articles.
At the Jan. 21 meeting, where the Board of Selectmen decided which articles to recommend, much of the discussion circled around reluctance to hire staff or make major expenditures in the face of a possible economic recession.
An article on the Bolton Field Memorial Complex that would issue a $125,000 10-year bond for improvements narrowly failed to win the board’s recommendation in a 3-2 vote. Selectmen Heleen Kurk, Wendy Clark and Donna Osborne supported the idea but not the timing.
The $900,000 bond for a new Public Works and Transfer Station facility did win unanimous selectmen approval.
The board decided not to recommend the articles requesting $92,000 for two new police officers, $80,000 for two full-time firefighters/EMTs to cover the daytime shift starting halfway into the year and approximately $23,000 for EMTs to cover weekends and holiday, starting halfway into the year.
A petitioned article to turn the building department secretary’s part-time position into a full-time position for $16,769 also did not win the board’s recommendation.
Other petitioned articles call for tax exemptions for solar energy, a reduction in the amount of land use change tax that goes toward the conservation commission from 75 percent to 50 percent and a non-binding resolution to reject the “pledge” against new taxes, introduced in multiple New Hampshire town warrants by a group called the Granite State Fair Tax Coalition.
One article that the board withheld making recommendation for or against was the $125,000 article for implementing a step merit-based pay scale system for nonunion town employees.
Clark and Kurk said they commended the work of the committee that had established the pay scale, but had gone over the numbers and felt the figure in the article was high.
Clark said she could not recommend the article.
“If we are in a recession, it’s going to be a long one. It’s a lot to ask taxpayers to step up,” she said.
Kurk supported the idea behind the article but not the figure.
Since the figures in the articles could not be changed until the deliberative session, the board decided to meet in a workshop to possibly come up with a viable alternative to present to voters at the deliberative session.
“I want this to pass and the only way it’ll pass is if the whole board supports it,” said Chairman Tom Clow.