By Michelle Fountain, Standard Correspondent
The discovery of a 37-year-old vote that merged the town and village highway departments has caused the Select Board to put forward a budget for 2017/2018 that unites those departments again. That change, along with a loss of revenue, accounts for most of the increase in the budget from last year’s $4,888,958 to the proposed $5,451,711.
The tax rate to cover this larger budget is an increase of 5-cents per $100 of assessed value over last year. For an individual with a $250,000 property, the tax will be up $125. About $50 of that increase is for the unified highway budget.
In 1980, the voters of Woodstock town and village voted 659-270 to merge the town and village highway departments. They ran as a combined department for four years, then there was a vote to separate into two departments again that was defeated 635-307. Yet, somehow, the departments were separated again by 1985 and no one remembers how or why.
“I found it by accident,” Municipal Manager Phil Swanson says of the article that passed in 1980. He was looking for something else and stumbled upon it, then traced it through to the present day to see that it was never repealed.
“Whoever wrote the budget for ’85 kept them (the highway departments) separate. It’s been that way ever since,” Swanson says.
“I brought it to the Select Board and the Trustees and they decided that it was what the town wanted to do and felt they should write the budget that way,” Swanson says.
The 1888 legislation that established the separate town and village of Woodstock, specified that the town return 2/3 of the highway tax that village residents pay to the town, back to the village for their highway costs. The village then had to raise additional funds through their budget to pay for the roads they had to maintain, including Route 4.
“Everybody will pay the same rate for town highway services,” Swanson says of the way the budget works with a unified highway department. The end result is that village residents will see their overall (town and village combined) tax rate decrease, while town residents will see an increase.
“It has never seemed fair that village residents pay an additional tax for roads that we all use,” Select Board Chair Preston Bristow says in his comments in the Town Report as he explains the change back to the unified highway department.
“Non-tax revenues are down,” Swanson says regarding the other increases in the budget. There is no surplus being carried over from last year, which often offsets some portion of any increase. Last year there was also $62,000 in timber sales from the town forest that is not in this budget.
The ambulance department is up from $338,950 last year to $402,500 due to increased benefits costs and the addition of a full-time paramedic. The fire department budget is up from $118,600 last year to $149,200 primarily due to the need to get more coverage for fire alarm calls. “This budget proposes a two-hour minimum call-out,” Swanson says noting that volunteers were previously paid only one-hour to respond to a fire alarm tripping at a home. Noting that not all fire alarms are false he says of the increased minimum, “It is a reward for people who answer the call.”
The contract that the town has with the Woodstock Village Police department for police services will see the town increase from paying 33 percent of most police expenses to 37 percent this year to better reflect that amount of time the police force spends on calls from the town, according to Swanson.
The budget includes replacing sidewalks at Vail Field that Swanson calls “tripping hazards.” That money has already been set aside by previous articles ($25,000 each year) as part of eventual improvements at Vail including new tennis and basketball courts.
The budget also includes an increase in fuel to begin using the new snow dump off Maxham Meadow Way, but since fuel and utility costs are down, this does not really impact the budget.
Voters will gather on Saturday, March 4, to consider this budget and will also have Australian balloting on Tuesday, March 7 to consider all articles and to vote for Select Board members. Incumbent Preston Bristow and Sonya Stover are vying for a three-year term on the board, and Jill Davies is running unopposed for a two-year term.
This article first appeared in the February 16, 2016 edition of the Vermont Standard.