The Finance Committee will meet on Tuesday at 7PM to talk about budget priorties and how to set the departmental budgets for FY 2010. To help them in that task, they will use a spreadsheet with the FY09 appropriations and departmental turnbacks listed on it. If you would like to try your hand at it, the spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel format can be found here, You will need to have Excel or Open Office to open the file. Open Office is freeware and can be downloaded here.
The historical percentage of increase for the School department and Voke budgets are between ...
...4 and 4-1/2 %. A good number to use would be 4.3% for each. The pension and health care costs have historically risen at about 5%. Use that for predicting those budgets. Overall expense in all the town departments rises at about 4%.
The Budget Direcror has asked for across the board reductions of 15% from the department heads. I would allocate teh cuts in a more directed fashion. The Police Chief said last Thursday that he can keep his present staffing levels with level funding, no increase. I am inclined to fund the Police at last year's level which will allow him to keep all his staff. That means other departments will get cut more. Those are the kinds of decisions that must be made.What are your thoughts or comments?
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Finance Comittee considers budget targets
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16 comments:
Bill, going over the document I noticed a line item for 238,000 for select board. I dont understand exactly how 5 part time volunteers as Joe continually call yourselves cost 238,000.please elaborate.
The Budget Line item labeled "Select Board" is actually the Executive Administrators budget since he works for the Select Board. This budget also contains limited 'Expense'funds that serve as a catch-all for various departments giving the Exec Admin flexibility to solve small everyday problems such as needed manpower, small repairs, supplies and the like.
Our family will gladly pay 100 for an override to keep public services, something needs to happen while the year long talk of privatization occurs. There needs to be a plan and this will be hard with zero Exec. Administrator planning.
My family will be glad to pay $100 also to maintain the current level of services. When all of the cuts happen, the work will not get done and we will end of paying twice as much to complete it. Pay little now or pay alot later.
My family won't be voting for any overrides!!!!
Neither will mine.
Mine will.
How about we have a card carrying society. Anybody carrying the card stating you paid the extra dollars for the services, you get them and whoever didn't pay, does not.
Overrides? Are you oblivious to the economy? Overrides? Don't talk about overrides. Overrides!! Are you kidding me? Overrides? Don't talk about overrides.
Mine will too.
100 is no biggie, tell us what we need to pay up. We support our town!
Count me in. I support this town.
Please send your donations to:
Town Of Dartmouth General Fund
400 Slocum Road
Dartmouth 02747
Thanks for your support!
By the way, you'll need to send an extra $120 bucks next year, $140 the year after, and so on.
I can't believe these posts! People, overrides won't solve our problems! I'm not saying we will never have another override, but let's get busy and start changing the way we do business. If everything stays the same...guess what? We sink deeper and deeper every year. Overrides or sending $$ to town hall won't work.
Don't be too concerned about all the posts supporting overrides. They are all from the same person.
No, they're not actually.
HEY in today's chronicle it states the Select board needs to PLAN..I thought that was MIKE's job and that was the reason for getting rid of ..because he can't PLAN..but the chronicle states differently it's the SB's job to PLAn..hmmm
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