Holding the line

Town spending plan includes 0.5 percent increase, overtime, budget cuts across the board

The Colonie town budget set to go up a small amount despite pandemic effects./

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the town has released a tentative budget that has the smallest spending increase in well over a decade and will keep property taxes essentially flat.

The proposed 2021 budget of $99.9 million is a 0.54 percent increase from 2020’s spending plan.

“The pandemic put us in a position with significant challenges that we had to work out,” said Town Supervisor Paula Mahan. “We had made a lot of reductions in the 2020 budget to get through the pandemic.”

Mahan said she asked each department head in the town to cut 10 percent from their budget this past year.

Some cuts included not filling about 11 positions made vacant after retirements, a halt to spending in nonemergency situations and reducing contractual payments and equipment purchases. Salaries have also been frozen, and overtime allotment has decreased by roughly $81,000 — $80,000 of which was taken from the police department.

Most of those department cuts were then carried over to the 2021 tentative budget.

“It was difficult because we’ve been doing so well with the budgets, and this would have been a year that would not have been overly difficult,” said Chris Kelsey, town comptroller. “The pandemic put us back to our early 2008, 2009, 2010 years, where it was pretty tough financially.”

The biggest hit caused by the pandemic was in sales tax revenue.

Kelsey said the town has averaged a 2 percent increase in sales tax revenue each year. However, the town made a conservative estimate of a 5 percent reduction in sales tax revenue for 2021 — which amounts to $1.3 million.

Some department cuts made in 2020,

however, were not carried into the 2021 budget.

“A lot of the programmatic cuts we did in the parks department were restored, like our pool and youth summer camp program, which I think is big for our community to see and hear,” Kelsey said.

If the budget is approved, homeowners will see a general property tax rate increase of 6.8 cents per $1,000 of assessed valuation, which would equate to $9.24 annually for a median taxable-value home in Colonie. Mahan and Kelsey said it is the lowest impact on Colonie residents while still retaining services.

“We took into consideration that a lot of families were struggling financially due to the pandemic,” Mahan said.

“We were able to do what we wanted to do to keep all the services going and keep everything moving forward and have the least impact on our taxpayers as possible.”