Financial growth out of reach for Saugus

SAUGUS – While town officials and residents were hoping 2009 would be a financial recovery year for the town, it is looking more and more like that won’t happen.A projected increase in healthcare costs, a growing snow and ice deficit, the Kasabuski deficit and a budget still reeling from last year’s cuts will likely hamper any financial growth.With a special Town Meeting planned for Monday, Town Manager Andrew Bisignani is looking to move around more than $1 million. He is looking for transfers to pay additional overtime for the police and fire departments as well as the dispatchers. He is also seeking funds to pay off the teachers’ contract and permission to essentially sublease the Kasabuski Ice Arena.While he believes additional growth will provide funding to cover the Town Meeting requests at least in part, increases in deficits may sink any chance the town has at recovery.”There will be an increase in healthcare,” Bisignani said. “It will still go up, just not as much.”Even with employees enrolled in the state’s money-saving Group Insurance Commission, Bisignani said healthcare costs would still increase as they do every year.”It could go up 8 percent, but it won’t be 22 percent, which is what it could have been under the old plan,” he said.After four hefty storms the town’s snow and ice account is overdrawn by more than $100,000. Bisignani said the town had spent roughly $257,000 on snow and ice cleanup prior to last Monday’s storm. Department of Public Works Superintendent Joseph Attubato estimated the cleanup from that squall would cost $75,000 when all was said and done.Town Meeting only budgeted $150,000 for the year. It is typical for communities to under fund snow and ice accounts, but that money will have to be made up in the fiscal year 2009 budget.Bisignani said he is actually afraid the snow and ice deficit will top $1 million.”Which at this point is not out of the realm of possibility,” he said.If Town Meeting fails to approve a bid to sublease the ice rink, that will be another $650,000 Bisignani will have to find within the budget. Bisignani wants to put a request for proposals out for the rink and said paying off the $650,000 deficit would be a requirement of the bid.Bisignani also said when Town Meeting cut $3.5 million from the budget last year and used another $1.5 million in growth to offset a deficit, it essentially took $5 million off the table that won’t be back for 2009.Healthcare increases coupled with a growing snow and ice deficit and $5 million lost to budget cuts tied to a floundering ice rink is setting FY 2009 up as anything but recovery time.”We’ll never recover to where we were,” he said. “We’ll never get back to the kind of spending we had years ago.”