NAHANT — Residents poured into Nahant Village Church for breakfast on Friday morning to hear Town Administrator Tony Barletta talk about the warrant articles for the upcoming Town Meeting.
The morning began at 8 a.m. sharp with Barletta giving an introduction on the upcoming Town Meeting and why he felt discussing the budget was important.
“When I first started in Nahant, one of the things we tried to do was push more public forums to give people information before Town Meeting, so they’d have more information when they vote at Town Meeting,” Barletta said
He mentioned a lot of good feedback in those previous meetings, where people felt more educated about the topics being voted on.
“We started this process way back in December, where our finance director and I talked about what policy decisions might be coming up, and other special articles that need to be on the warrant. In January, citizens’ petitions and committee requests are due.”
From January to April, he emphasized eight weeks of four public meetings per week. Barletta listed the Climate Protection Committee (CPC), Planning Board, Board of Selectmen, and the work that different committees put into Town Meeting. “When you go to Town Meeting, please applaud all the people who gave you something to vote on,” he said.
“I talk to the community every year about how the budget works, and I’d like to spend time on it because it’s the most important part of Town Meeting… It allows us to accomplish a lot of these goals that we couldn’t otherwise accomplish on our own.”
“This year’s free cash amount is from the last fiscal year, as extra money we brought in and didn’t spend to bring us this year’s amount, and use it for one time expenses… Such as building up a stabilization account, paying off debt, and one time expenses for capital needs,” Barletta explained.
“We started meeting with department heads, and ask, ‘What do you need? What do you want?’ and ‘How can we fit our needs and wants into that bucket of revenue?’”
In the operational requests that the town did not fund, Barletta noted the town had to say no to about $500,000 in requests, and that the town had to cut things that it normally funded on an annual basis, which has left the town searching for ways to use alternative sources of funding to try and fund the requests.
He added that the town’s expenses are going up at a faster rate than the town’s revenue stream.
“The two biggest items that led to that burden were an unexpected increase in special education costs. There were five new students that qualified, and we have to pay for tuition and transportation for them —our health insurance costs went up almost 19%, and we’re being told to expect a double-digit increase for the next couple years,” Barletta said.
“But there are ways to combat that, such as being creative with ways in the budget, but there are major challenges that we faced this year that caused this issue. Also in between on coast guard, no income from rent because we’ve sold, but properties haven’t been developed yet, so we’re kind of in a weird in-between right now,” he explained.
He said this is the first year since 2018 that the town has not put money into the stabilization funds, but reiterated that since the town is in a good place, it has the flexibility to not put money into it for the time being.
“We’ve also been talking with the Finance Committee and the Board of Selectmen about an operational override next year,” he said. “A ton of staffing needs in schools, police and fire, retirements in the special services department… The old model of getting that type of part time service for cheap doesn’t work anymore, we should be providing these services, but we can’t afford it at the current rate.”
Barletta also noted the town is expecting about $2.5 million in profit from the closing of the former Coast Guard Housing lots, and that it has already paid off all debt associated with the project.
