Brookfield’s Dunn unveils $75M budget
Plan would raise tax rate by 1.63%
BROOKFIELD — The first selectman has proposed a town budget that would increase the tax rate by 1.63 percent next fiscal year.
“In a pandemic, I think that’s great,” said First Selectman Steve Dunn of the marginal increase.
The about $75 million proposal presented Thursday night includes $28.1 million for the town and $46.9 million for the schools.
New estimates on health insurance costs for
teachers brought down the school budget increase from 4.07 percent to 3.29 percent.
“They were significantly lower than what we thought they were going to be,” Dunn said of the health insurance costs.
But the education board will still get about $1.5 million more than last year.
Overall town and school spending would increase by $3.55 million, or 4.96 percent, from last year. The town’s debt has been driven up, due in part to $1.22 million in school bond interest that will be due in August.
Spending for the town includes $20 million for municipal operations, $5.83 million for debt service, and $2.29 million for capital and other costs.
“It was very thorough, and I can’t say that I’ll be making any changes, but I do want to just take a little closer look at it before I say yes,” Selectman Susan Slater said.
“There’s a lot of places that we could just tweak one way or the other,” Finance Director Marcia Marien said.
Dunn said the budget was “taking mostly a pretty conservative view” of payments and expenditures.
Final deliberations from the Board of Selectmen are scheduled for Feb. 25. The finalized budget will be due to the Board of Finance on March 3.
Like the rest of Connecticut, Brookfield was unable to hold a referendum on their budget last year due to state-mandated pandemic protocol, but Dunn expects residents to be able to take part this year.
“We fully plan to have a vote this year,” Dunn said. “If we can do a presidential election where 92 percent of our voters show up safely, we can certainly do a referendum on our budget.”