Darien RTM OKs record budget

DARIEN — Convening in person for the first time since March 2020, the Representative Town Meeting formally approved a budget for the 2022-23 fiscal year on Monday that offered no surprises despite being the biggest budget the town has passed.

Sporting mandatory masks, around 68 members of the nearly 100member body clustered in the Town Hall auditorium Monday night to vote on multiple budgetary measures. In keeping with a relatively straightforward budget session, there were no last-minute surprises or major cuts to funding.

Using figures already approved by the Board of Finance in March, the RTM approved the mill rate of 17.23 — which represents a 2.32 percent increase from the 2021-22 budget.

It also greenlit the Board of Education’s operating budget at $110.6 million and the town’s budget of $48.4 million for the 2022-23 fiscal year.

“This is the biggest budget in the history of the town,” moderator Seth Morton said in his opening remarks. “It’s complicated, but I think you’re going to find ... you’ll learn a lot about how the finances get put together.”

During the meeting, the RTM nearly unanimously approved all appropriations on the docket, including one to transfer $2.9 million from the town’s general fund for this year’s major capital projects. Those included the purchase of a property on Crimmins Road and a drainage study conducted for the Tilley Pond Watershed.

The town will also be spending $870,000 for new sidewalks and $450,000 for a rebuilt track at Darien High School.

There are nearly $1.3 million worth of capital projects that will need to be funded through taxes, Jack Davis, the chair of the RTM’s Finance and Budget committee, told members.

He noted that the town’s budget came in at a 3.79 percent increase from last year — a figure he said he was not happy about.

“There’s a lot of things that are offered in this budget. They’re all nice projects. But not every blooming project is a priority,” Davis said, adding that had the mill rate been any higher, he would have recommended several capital projects be slashed from the budget.

Various RTM committee chairs also spoke at Monday’s meeting to highlight the capital projects included under their purview.

Most signaled their full support of the budget as presented. But during a discussion of the Board of Education’s budget this year, RTM education committee chair Edward Washecka urged town officials to include more rationale in budget cuts moving forward.

Nearly the entire education committee felt the school board’s process had room for improvement, Washecka said. He pointed to the add-cut process — where individual board members can make a motion to add or remove line items in the school budget without giving their reasoning — as being “unnecessarily unhelpful.