Groton Town Council approves tax increase

Groton — The Town Council on Tuesday approved a tax rate of 21.73 mills for the coming fiscal year — a 3.7 percent increase over the current tax rate of 20.95 mills.

Under the new rate, taxpayers would pay $2,173 in local property taxes for every $100,000 of assessed value, or $78 more than the current year.

The higher mill rate was needed to support a budget of about $121.6 million for the fiscal year that begins July 1.

The budget represents a 3.3 percent decrease in spending, but taxes rose anyway due to declining revenues.

Town Manager Mark Oefinger said general government departments bore the brunt of the cuts, with the departments of public works, public safety and parks and recreation hit particularly hard.

He met with department heads on Tuesday morning and said they would meet again next week to discuss the impact of the cuts.

Some departments may need to make quick decisions if layoffs are needed, to avoid turning one layoff into two, he said.

“There were some pretty radical cuts, so it obviously is going to have an impact,” he told councilors, though he added that it would be premature to say what that impact would be.

But he told the council it should decide what town services it wants in the future.

“I’m at a total and complete loss as to what to do for next year,” he said.

The Representative Town Meeting cut departments additionally after the Town Council reviewed the budget.

At the end of the process, public works — which has a budget of $6.6 million this year — lost $600,000, or 9.2 percent, of its funding.

Public safety suffered a 3.2 percent cut and parks and recreation was slashed 8.4 percent.

“Unfortunately, I think it was necessary,” Councilor Diane Barber said of the cuts in general.

Taxpayers still will see taxes increase, but it could have been worse, she said.

Councilor Karen Morton said she also had to applaud the RTM’s effort, although she disagreed with some of its decisions.

In the future, Groton should look at anything it’s paying for that the town is not legally required to fund, she said.

But Councilor Joe de la Cruz said the budget felt to him like a “race to the bottom” to see which community could end up with the worst services.

People in the community who need the services would feel the cuts the most, he said.

“I’m not happy with the budget,” he said. “And I’m sure we’re probably going to end up losing money, losing some kind of revenue in there somewhere, because a lot of times again, some of those programs that we have create money and they bring money in. So a lot of times just cutting doesn’t always make sense.”