Madison First Selectman Discusses Next Year's Budget, New Revenue Ideas

Originally written by Jack Kramer, Correspondent

MADISON, CT — The initial budget requests for 2017-2018 are in, and in the words of First Selectman Tom Banisch, “now the hard work begins.”

Banisch said the budget forecast for the town side of expenditures have come in at “between 2.2 percent and 4.4 percent higher than last year.”

The first selectman said those figures are a bit misleading, since he pointed out, all budgets were cut by his order last year by 3 percent.

The Board of Education’s initial budgeted forecast for 2017-2018 calls for about a 2.58 percent increase, Banisch said.

The first selectman said he isn’t planning to request budgets be kept as tight this year as last year for a couple of reasons.

“We have a big surplus,” Banisch said. “Plus, he said, we’ve got big town public works projects that have been put off for long.”

Those projects, Banisch said, include fixing roads, cleaning drains and the like.

While the first selectman said the town needs to spend some of its surplus money to take care of long put off repairs, it doesn’t mean that Madison can’t figure out ways to come up with new revenue streams.

One of those ideas, Banisch said, is to take a closer look at the town’s licensing and permit procedures, which he said, “haven’t been updated in 40 years.”

He said one simple idea that came out of looking at the permitting system is realizing that Madison, unlike neighboring towns such as Clinton and Guilford, don’t charge a permitting fee for restaurants that are located in town.

Banisch said his department heads will continue to search for new revenue streams, while he, as our all other chief executives in the state of Connecticut, keeping a close eye on what happens in Hartford, as state officials wrestle with how to cut into a projected $1.5 billion budget deficit.

Madison recently took a $160,00 cut from the state in its current year school spending allocation.

(Editor's Note: This story first ran previously but here it is again in case you missed it.)