Selectmen: We need the override
Published on March 29th, 2006
STONEHAM, MA - The passage of the $1.2 million debt exclusion question would restore virtually every position and service slated for the FY'07 chopping block, town officials concluded Tuesday night.
Outlining how the citizen tax increase would be distributed to municipal departments, Selectmen Chair Robert Sweeney proposed tapping the funding vehicle to avoid $500,000 worth of planned reductions, including the loss of four police and fire department personnel.
"We definitely as a town need to generate that much money," said Sweeney in a plea to Stoneham citizens. "The cuts without the debt exclusion or the trash fee would be too dramatic."
"The $1.2 million would put back a lot of important programs and positions on the town side and the school side. We're just trying to keep the status quo. We trying to keep up FY'07 like FY'06," Town Administrator Ron Florino would later add.
A summary of how the debt exclusion would restore anticipated municipal cuts is as follows:
• $140,000 for two police officer positions left vacant
• $140,000 for two firefighting positions left vacant
• $40,000 for one DPW laborer
• $50,000 for the library book budget and to maintain current library hours
• $30,000 to restore Senior Center van driver
• $100,000 for field maintenance
Leaving a $700,000 share for the school department to utilize, School Committee Chairwoman Marie Christie later advocated for abandoning every single potential educational reduction, should the debt exclusion override pass at next Tuesday's April 4th election.
According to Christie, while she couldn't guarantee that her School Committee counterparts would consent to that course-of-action, the $700,000 allotment would whisk away any need for expense reductions.
"Since the School Committee has not met on our put-back, my recommendation would be to put back everything we took off. That would take care of just about all of these, everything I read," said Christie, in response to a question from Sweeney.
Should the educational board formally accept the Chairwoman's suggestion at a School Committee meeting this Thursday, the $700,000 would restore the following planned cuts, among others:
• $76,000 to avoid the closure of the rear-wing of the Middle School, which would have shipped all grade six pupils to the Central School
• $126,000 to restore four elementary school teachers, preventing proposed redistricting at the South and Colonial Park Elementary schools
• $110,000 for three Middle School teachers
• $103,823 to restore all sub-varsity high school athletics
• $106,000 to restore the athletic director and athletic director's secretary positions to full-time levels
• $22,549 to avoid laying off a Middle School math teacher, whose position would have been filled by the Assistant Principal
• Restoration of four custodians across the district
According to Town Administrator Ron Florino, Stoneham had originally faced a $2.8 million FY'07 deficit, a financial gap that was widdled down to $1.8 million by drawing from the town's reserve coffers. Additional tax receipts from new growth and an anticipated jump in state aid appropriations also contributed to offseting the $2.8 million figure.
Splitting that resulting $1.8 million hole between the town and the school side, that deficit has now been reduced even further recently by a better than expected health insurance quote.
"I updated my budgets based on new information that I received on the health insurance quote. We did get a 9.68 percent [figure], which is an additional four percent [reduction]. That's a savings of $200,000," Florino told the Selectmen.
According to the Town Administrator, he divided that new windfall equally between the municipal and school sectors, meaning each side will now be responsible for $800,000 in reductions should the debt exclusion fail.
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