Town council will vote on reduced budget

Meeting by videoconference for less than 15 minutes Monday night (June 8), the Washington Town Council held a brief virtual public hearing on the town’s fiscal-year 2020-21 budget — reduced overall by about a third from the current, COVID-interrupted year.

The council then voted unanimously to continue the meeting until next 7 p.m. Monday (June 15), when they’ll vote to approve. That meeting will also be hosted online via Zoom. (To attend any of the town meetings online, contact Town Clerk Barbara Batson at 540-675-3128 or townofwashington@washingtonva.gov).

The only town resident who attended Monday, Nancy Buntin, said she was just interested in what the town was doing to cope with reduced income in the coming year, but town Treasurer Gail Swift had already addressed her concerns in a brief presentation to the council, having outlined a “very conservative” total budget for 2020-21 of $605,940 — down about 30 percent from the $898,050 total for the current year, which ends June 30.

About half of the town’s income comes from its meals and lodging tax — and the lion’s share of that is paid by the Inn at Little Washington, which only just reopened last week at 50 percent capacity, as required by the rules imposed by Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam as the state continues a phased return from its three-month coronavirus shutdown.

“Everything is so . . . well, nobody knows what's going to happen over the next year,” Swift said later by phone. “This budget takes into account the worst-case scenario.”

Mayor Fred Catlin thanked Swift and council member Joe Whited for their work on the budget, which also included a one-year deferment, approved last month, of the town’s biggest single fixed expense — payments on its $4 million loan to build the town’s wastewater treatment plant (of which a balance of about $1.2 million remains).