LONGMEADOW – The Longmeadow Select Board met for a regularly scheduled remote meeting to decide on potential tax ceiling legislation, discuss the fiscal year 2021 budget and review the Town Meeting warrant.

Board Chair Marie Angelides started the meeting by confirming the town’s municipal election date as June 16 and encouraged residents to apply for absentee ballots ahead of this year’s elections. “We’re encouraging residents to request absentee ballots, and you can request one for the whole year for all elections including the municipal, the primary in September, and the election in November,” she said.

During his regular update on COVID-19, Fire Chief John Dearborn said that any reopening process will likely take a long time. He said, “The Task Force is actively discussing reopening plans, but we don’t expect more guidance before May 18. When we get the guidance, we fully believe it will be a slow approach lasting many months.”

The first action item at the meeting was to decide on adding a warrant article to the Town Meeting to potentially eliminate the tax ceiling. Board Member and chair of the Tax Ceiling Task Force Mark Gold said that there were two options when it came to the article.

“Option 1 is to go forward with a proposal for legislation to eliminate the tax ceiling, option 2 would be to go forward with legislation that would raise the tax ceiling,” he said. “The group as a whole supported deleting the tax ceiling rather than going back and adding a ceiling we would have to keep changing.”

He explained that this would just be the first step in the process. If adopted at the upcoming Town Meeting and by the Legislature, it would have to get a two-thirds majority vote at another Town Meeting and then go to a town-wide referendum before it was officially approved.

While the other members had little to say about the action, Selectman Tom Lachiusa voiced his concerns over raising the ceiling and said, “I really see this as a long-term solution to a short-term problem. I’m really more interested in seeing the town make adjustments so property values increase rather than taxes continuing to increase.”

 Ultimately the article passed with a 3-2 majority vote.

Before jumping into the warrant article review, Town Moderator Rebecca Townsend jumped into the call to discuss the current planning process for the meeting. She said that the town is doing everything to prepare for a Town Meeting that follows social distancing and sanitization guidelines, but stressed that if large gatherings are banned that the town postpone, even though Town Meetings are exempt from the current rules. As part of the discussion with Townsend, the board also named Longmeadow High School as the location for the meeting and depending on the social distancing guidelines, will likely be in the parking lot.

With the preliminary discussion out of the way the board reviewed the Town Meeting warrant. During the review Angelides said one of her goals was to streamline the meeting as much as possible for residents, especially by bundling items together wherever they can.

“I think residents appreciate it when we bundle things together and there’s also gonna be extra stress for this meeting,” she said, “The weather could be very hot and it could be stressful for people to be out in a large group like this. I think we are doing them a disservice by not making this as streamlined as possible.”

As part of the review, the board went through the original 43 warrant articles to update the costs of some of the requests or to add them to a consent agenda, including adding six CPC articles to one agenda item. The board also elected to postpone seven articles to the fall Town Meeting.

During the meeting, Pasterzcyk also gave an update on the 2021 fiscal year budget. He said that he is expecting at least $591,000 in cuts along with a loss of about $250,000 in state aid. He added that one possible way to counteract the losses would be to use some potential extra money he is anticipating from free cash at the fall Town Meeting.

Selectman Richard Foster suggested that one way the town could cut expenses is by holding off some capital projects He said, “It would seem to me there is a lot more stuff in the capital program that could be differed for one year. There’s some really large ticket items that I think with a little bit of engineering we could push them over for one more year.”