SAUGUS — The Board of Selectmen on Monday night approved a $125.3 million budget submitted by Town Manager Scott Crabtree, sending the document to the Finance Committee for further review and deliberation, a process set to begin in the coming weeks.
The budget voted for on Monday night represents an estimate of the town’s expenditures for the 2024 Fiscal Year (FY24). The document Crabtree submitted does not include local aid estimates announced by Governor Maura Healey’s office last week, nor does it include the final budget request voted on by the School Committee. Instead, the figure recommended by Crabtree is nearly $1 million lower than the figure approved by the committee, already a reduction from the request first put forward by Superintendent Erin McMahon in January.
Of the $103 million in general fund operating budgets proposed by Crabtree, $73.1 million is set to go to the general fund and $30.7 million is set to go to the school fund operating budget. The rest of the budget money is allocated to state and county cherry sheet charges, water/sewer enterprise funds, cherry sheet offsets, and an allowance for abatements and exemptions.
In explaining the reasoning behind the lower allocation for the schools, Crabtree pointed to a fear of setting an operating budget that is higher than is sustainable, which could create a structural deficit moving forward. Without delving into specifics, Crabtree said superintendents of schools have, in the past, hired positions with grant money and then come to the town asking for the positions to be included in their operating budget.
He also said the district has unexpended grant funds, and pointed to the $3 million set aside in a Student Support Reserve Fund specifically for the schools as a way to potentially close the gap. Crabtree said he would continue meeting with School Committee members on the budget in an effort to “meet some of their needs.”
“The way I look at it is if you’re giving them $500,000 off the get-go to the schools, and our tax levy is only going up $1.9 million, you’re giving them 20 percent of our additional revenue, the tax revenue that’s coming into the town, and … the $30 million don’t even make up 20 percent [of the budget] in total,” said Board member Jeff Cicolini.
The budget put forward by Crabtree sets the town up to have no structural deficit but also no surplus, with $125,386,680 in funds available and $125,386,680 used.
Crabtree explained that town officials faced a number of challenges in putting the budget together including a lack of finalized fixed cost increases for expenses such as health insurance, trash hauling, and capital improvements.
One of the biggest expenditures he outlined was the town’s contribution to the Northeast Metropolitan Regional Vocational School building project, with the FY24 debt service set at $215,183 and the total cost of regional school assessments set at $3.235 million for both the vocational school and Essex Tech.
Cicolini proposed using some of the Chapter 70 funds allocated to the town from the state to help offset some of those costs. Crabtree lightly pushed back on the idea, saying school officials would likely argue that the funds were intended to go towards the district, and not to offset the cost of the vocational school, which is in Wakefield. He added that he was likely to set aside some of the Chapter 70 funds in the Student Support Reserve Fund, which school officials have said they are frustrated with.
“They don’t like that we put money [away] that they have to come with a plan [for],” Crabtree said. “It’s like a balance.”
The capital improvement expenditures included in the budget do not concern any particular large project, Crabtree said, with the town instead focusing on preventative improvements meant to intercept anything that is degrading before it reaches the point that it becomes “catastrophic.”
Many of the estimates included in the budget represent conservative totals, Treasurer/Collector Wendy Hatch told the board, with the town being reluctant to overestimate and create a deficit.
After Crabtree outlined the overall budget and major impending costs, board members asked specific questions about line items in the 69-page operating budget. Questions were particularly directed towards vacancies in town departments, with the budget including positions that remain unfilled.
While board members did not take issue with any particular area of the budget, Cicolini urged Crabtree to amend the document to include a social media manager in his office to improve communication with residents and overhaul the town’s website. During Crabtree’s evaluation earlier this year, all five members of the board urged him to improve communication.
With the Selectmen unanimously approving the budget Monday evening, the document now moves to the Finance Committee, which will hold hearings on the budget. Crabtree said he expected that process to begin in the next week or two, with the committee eventually voting to make a recommendation to Town Meeting.
