Lower fuel costs lead to budget tinkering

Finance board sends Waterford municipal, school plans to RTM

Waterford — The Board of Finance took its last look at the fiscal year 2017-18 town budgets Monday, making adjustments to multiple departments to account for lower-than-expected fuel costs but leaving others largely unchanged.

Monday’s meeting signaled the end of the penultimate budget review, and the movement of the budget deliberations on to the Representative Town Meeting deliberations that will begin in May.

Because bids for fuel and oil that came in since the board’s last meeting were lower than expected, the board voted to slightly cut the budgets of the school district, the police department, the public works department and several others that use oil and fuel.

The total proposed municipal spending now comes to $32,165,715, a $403,359 or 1.27 percent increase over the current year’s budgeted spending.

The proposed education budget went down slightly because of the lower fuel costs, but still totals $47,287,524 — a proposed 3.04 percent increase that Superintendent Thomas Giard has said mostly represents contractual and fixed costs.

Under the town’s new proposed budget, $11,350,434 would go toward capital projects, such as replacing police equipment or repairing roads, and paying off

town bonds.

Over its month of budget hearings the Board of Finance left the various departmental and commission budgets mostly untouched, acknowledging that town department heads kept their requests slim and that taxes will likely go up anyway because of predictions of lower state aid as state legislators attempt to repair the state budget deficit.

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s budget proposal, which the General Assembly will begin deliberating on next month, would cut $1.5 million in state aid to Waterford if passed unchanged by the state legislature.

The three-person Board of Selectmen, led by First Selectman Daniel Steward, had already reviewed the town’s department budget requests, and the Board of Education passed a school budget proposal on to the Board of Finance at the end of February.

The 22-member Representative Town Meeting will take up the budgets in a series of meetings in May.