Tolland Town Manager Issues Budget Statement

TOLLAND, CT — Tolland Town Manager Steve Werbner on Tuesday issued the following budget message:

To The Residents of Tolland:

I want to thank the many residents in the community that have attended budget meetings, written emails, sent letters and postcards and made phone calls to Town and State officials. We remain in a difficult situation due to the impact of the Governor’s budget proposal on Tolland. The revenue and expenditure impacts of that budget without any other changes to our budget result in an increase of 6.10 mills or 17.84 percent.

I have presented to the Town Council six different budget scenarios ranging in increases of 4.81 mills to 6.99 mills. I will be reviewing my recommendations at a Public Hearing at the Tolland High school auditorium on March 23rd at 7:30 PM. Also invited to speak at that meeting are the Lieutenant Governor and our State Representatives. I encourage as many of you as possible to attend and hear information on the details of the budget as well as the budget adoption process.

As many of you know our Charter mandated process for adopting a budget requires that we hold a Referendum on May 2nd and every other Tuesday there after until a budget is adopted. There is discussion amongst the Council to encourage a no vote on any budgets put forth until such time that we have better information from the State.

Better information will not be forthcoming until at least April 28th when theAppropriations Committee of the State Legislature presents it budget ideas and then when the legislature adopts a final budget which may not be before they adjourn on June 7th. If they fail to adopt a budget by that time then they must hold a special session which could go well into the summer.

We had asked the State Legislature to consider emergency legislation to allow Town and cities not withstanding language in their Charters to delay their budget adoption process until better information is available from the State. The bill was introduced two weeks ago and was not acted upon due to partisan debate.

The numbers within the budget are certainly open for some serious discussion but a bill requested by Towns and cities to allow for an orderly budget adoption process in light of what the state is going through should not be a political issue. Without this legislation Tolland may have to propose at least six new budgets and have six additional referendums from the period of May 2nd to June 30th.

We may also be required if we do not have a budget by June 15th to send out tax bills based on our current mill rate and then send out supplemental tax bills later in the year after a town budget is adopted to be collected as part of the January installment. To provide some order to what is otherwise a very chaotic budget process brought on by State budget difficulties we need this emergency legislation to be reintroduced and passed.

I would encourage you to email, tweet, write and call your local legislators and others within the State legislature to demand action on this bill (click here for a list of State Legislators).

As always should you have any questions on the budget process please do not hesitate to contact me at swerbner@tolland.org.

Patch File Photo