Council Explains Budget Cuts, Tax Hikes

The proposed 2010 town budget includes an average property tax increase of about $181 a year.

After wrangling salary freezes and other concessions out of the town employees and reducing operating expenses by the most in at least three years, the budget still grew by 1.5% to about $35.5 million, town officials said Tuesday.

The board will hold a public hearing on the budget on June 22.

"This is probably the most challenging budget this town has had in decades," Mayor Andy Skibitsky said.

The $25.3 million in local property taxes expected for the budget comes out to a tax rate of 1.329%. Based on the average assessed home value in 2010, that comes to $15.08 a month, said town administrator Jim Gildea.

Skibitsky pointed out that of the average $13,000 property tax bill in Westfield, 61% goes to the Board of Education and about 21% goes to county purposes. So the municipal portion is around $2,400 a year for all the services the town provides.

Still, some are likely to be upset with higher fees,the reductions in services, including hours at the conservation center, and the loss of up to a third of the town's crossing guards. The public comments section on the budget seemed like a rerun of last year's mayoral election, with Skibitsky's former opponent offering a critique of the budget plan.

"There has to be a tipping point," said Bill Brennan, the 2009 Democratic nominee for mayor who lost to Skibitsky. "You can't keep making cuts without cutting services."

Part of the difficulty of this budget was the larger-than-expected loss of state aid, and a reduction in receipts from other revenue sources, said Councilman Mark Ciarrocca, chairman of the finance policy committee.

Local property taxes now make up almost 65% of the budget, from 50% a few years ago, Skibitsky said.

"None of us wanted to make any of these cuts" but residents also don't want to pay more in taxes, Ciarrocca said.

"You can't complain about a reduction in services" when people also want to limit tax increases.

This year's reduction is state aid brought the total for the town to slightly more than $3 million, from about $4 million last year.

The only good thing about how much state aid has been cut is that the majority of what the town still gets -- roughly $2.5 million -- is from an energy tax distribution set by formula and not really something lawmakers can easily reduce, Gildea said.