Columbia budget plan down $7,500 from last year

COLUMBIA – Town voters will be asked Monday to approve a budget that is about $7,500 less than the current year’s spending plan.

They are being asked to raise $100,430, slightly less than the budget they approved a year ago for $108,044.

The difference, said Town Clerk Mary Ann Nichols, is that last year’s budget included raising $8,000 toward a matching grant for the fire department’s substation.

The budget to be presented does not include what the town will spend on both the county tax and costs related to SAD 37 schools. Those items will be considered at a separate time.

The annual town meeting takes place at 7 p.m. Monday, March 15, at the new Town Hall.

The hall has been open for business since summer, but did not have its official dedication until last Saturday. Then, more than 100 of Columbia’s 459 residents filled the hall for a supper.

The hall was rebuilt after a fire destroyed it in 2001.

Another bean supper at the hall, sponsored by the Columbia Volunteer Fire Department, will precede the town meeting at 5 p.m. Monday.

Most of the warrant items are “business as usual,” Nichols said.

One of the more unusual requests came from a resident who wants the town to dedicate to the town’s solid waste account the personal property taxes that a local business, Mark Wright Construction, will pay on its Dumpsters.

That money may offset a portion of the amount the town pays to the Pleasant River Solid Waste Disposal District facility as a member town.

Nichols said that the resident who proposed the item feels that Wright’s work in the region in the last year, when he developed a private trash-hauling service, has cut into facility’s budget that the six member towns pay into.

Another warrant item asks the town to approve the recommendations of a study group that wants to return the tidal flow to the Pleasant River.

The same kind of item appeared on the Addison warrant earlier this week, passing 66-61. By removing the gates put in place at the Addison Landing in 1940, saltwater will return to about 300 acres of marshland in both Addison and Columbia.

The west branch of the river flows through Addison, but some landowners in Columbia would be affected, Nichols said.