Residents can weigh in on city budget at public hearing

$144.3 million spending plan the topic tonight, 6:30, at Harris Hall

WOONSOCKET —

The City Council will be looking for as much input as it can get from the general public tonight as it prepares to fine-tune and approve Mayor Lisa

Baldelli-Hunt’s proposed

$144.3 million spending plan for fiscal 2019 next week.

Council President Dan

Gendron says it’s a safe bet the panel will make some adjustments to the proposed budget – exactly how depends on what he hears from residents at tonight’s public hearing, scheduled to begin at 6:30 in Harris Hall.

Unveiled two weeks ago by Baldelli-Hunt, the spending plan represents a complete makeover of the city’s tax structure because the fiscal year coincides with a decennial revaluation of real estate. While the budget calls for the creation of several new positions at City Hall, Baldelli-Hunt says taxes will remain flat or shrink for more than 80 percent of residents – the combined result of rising property values and lower tax rates for residential and commercial property.

“My goal is to get everything squared away after the hearing. That gives the council Friday, Saturday and Sunday to work on any possible amendments and on Monday come forward with a budget everybody, or a majority, can agree on. We’ll pass the budget and move on to other business.” —Council President Dan Gendron

This would mark the third year in a row of declining tax rates, but Gendron said he hopes to pass on additional savings to taxpayers by making cuts in the budget wherever warranted. Whether the additional personnel the mayor is seeking survives the scrutiny of the council, he said, is an open question.

“I haven’t really discussed this with the other councilors, but there’s always a goal in my mind to make the budget as lean as possible,” said the council president. “Certainly, looking at the budget I try to balance the benefit versus the cost. It’s not easy because I know everybody would like more. Every single employee would like an assistant. But unfortunately we’re not a community that can afford to give more and more assistance to every official working in city government.”

Baldelli-Hunt’s budget resurrects a 2017 request from Police Chief Thomas F. Oates III for a deputy chief, with a starting salary of $80,131. Another carryover from last year is the mayor’s request for an economic development director, this time with a starting salary of $70,000.

The council nixed both of those po-

sitions before approving the FY 18 budget last year.

In addition to a deputy chief and economic development director, the mayor’s spending plan calls for a chief of staff – a position that is sort of a combination of mayoral co-pilot and general manager for City Hall. That job would come with a starting salary of $65,000.

Despite the addition of executive-level managerial jobs, year-overyear spending on the municipal side of the budget in FY 2019 would be essentially flat, at roughly $79.7 million. Spending within the Woonsocket Education Department, which accounts for the balance of the budget, increases about $2.9 million, but most of that reflects a hike in state aid rather than new expenditures. The results of ongoing collective bargaining with the Woonsocket Teachers Guild could skew the picture after the budget is approved, but school officials have pledged to make ends meet by trimming costs rather than adding to the bottom line.

The most mystifying part of the budget for the average taxpayer to decipher may be the interaction between property values and tax rates: The state-mandated, 10-year revaluation resulted in an average combined increase of roughly 14 percent in the worth of commercial and residential real estate.

Since hikes in the overall tax levy are constrained by law, the city had to tamp down tax rates to account for higher property values.

Thus, in FY 2019, Baldelli-Hunt proposes cutting the residential tax rate from $30.10 to $24.08 per $1,000, and the commercial rate from $36.93 to $36.19 per $1,000. That’s a 20 percent dip for homeowners – 2 percent for businesses.

In the post-revaluation fiscal landscape, Baldelli-Hunt says, 83 percent of all residents will see their tax bills remain flat or decrease slightly in FY 2019. The remaining 17 percent will see varying increases.

Gendron said he’s confident that, after hearing from the residents tonight, the City Council will be ready to adopt a budget on Monday, during its next regular meeting in Harris Hall.

“I would expect we would be ready to pass a budget.” he said. “My goal is to get everything squared away after the hearing. That gives the council Friday, Saturday and Sunday to work on any possible amendments and on Monday come forward with a budget everybody, or a majority, can agree on. We’ll pass the budget and move on to other business.”