Council faces choices on budget changes

BANGOR – After laboring over the 2006 Fiscal Year budget for more than a month, the City Council received something Wednesday night that it probably wasn’t expecting: homework.

Four weeks of budget workshops produced several potential additions to the budget and even a handful of reductions.

The council’s next move is to do one of three things: vote to make no changes to the budget, make changes without raising the tax rate, or make changes that would raise the tax rate.

City finance director Debbie Cyr provided each council member Wednesday with an itemized list of the potential additions and reductions, instructing councilors to take the weekend to decide their course of action.

“There are nine opinions out there, so I really don’t know what will happen,” Cyr said after Wednesday’s meeting. “Some [councilors] will want to make changes, others will want to keep the tax rate the same.”

City Manager Edward Barrett unveiled his budget proposal in early May and the council has been going through it piece by piece while also fielding comments from the public.

For the most part, the budget has been well received, but Tuesday night, members of the public expressed concern over a proposed $98,700 cut to three of the city’s private schools.

That money primarily has been used to run buses for students at All Saints Catholic School, John Bapst Memorial High School and Bangor Christian School.

The city has maintained that even though it is receiving an extra $2 million for its education budget under LD1, the governor’s tax plan, none of that money can be used to offset the private school cuts.

Those cuts were among 27 items totaling $906,976 that could be put back into the 2006 budget. Another five items totaling $32,540 could be removed from the budget. Many of the other possible cuts involved elimination of municipal positions within the city, some of which already are vacant.

To accommodate putting programs targeted for cuts back into the budget, the city would have to either cut funding from other sources or raise the tax rate 5 cents for every $80,000 of property value, Cyr said, adding that raising the tax levy is unlikely.

Barrett said few, if any, other communities are considering raising the tax rate.

The tax rate for 2006 currently is set at $20.45 per $1,000, a 7 percent decrease from this year’s rate of $22.05. Barrett reminded the council that even though the tax rate is lower, that doesn’t mean taxpayers will be paying less, because in many cases property values will increase.

The council will meet again on Wednesday, June 8, to begin making budget decisions. The city has until the end of June to approve its 2006 budget of about $74.7 million – an increase of about 5.5 percent over this year’s budget.