Budget overview given to West Springfield Town Council

May 27, 2020 | Danielle Eaton
daniellee@thereminder.com

WEST SPRINGFIELD – The West Springfield Town Council hosted a meeting on May 18, where the town’s upcoming budget was a significant topic of discussion.

After some technical difficulties, the meeting was called to order with Council President, Brian Griffin reporting from the council chambers while the rest of the council reported to the meeting via Zoom. Also present at the meeting were Mayor William Reichlet and the town’s Chief Financial Officer, Sharon Wilcox, to give a brief overview of the budget to the council and the general public.

To begin, Reichelt explained that this year’s budget for the town of West Springfield was “essentially last year’s budget with cuts to it.” Reichelt said at the time the overview was being given, they “just don’t really know what’s going on.”

He said, “We don’t know where the state is going, we don’t know where the feds [are] going, so we’re basing a budget off of a bunch of assumptions…”

At the time of the meeting, Reichelt said “there’s no layoffs and there’s no tax increases” within the budget. However, he said this was “pending any big changes” and that “these are based on different assumptions” and “it’s also based on no future changes to the budget at the state or federal level.” Should that change, Reichelt said, the budget would be amended and presented to the council at a later date.

Reichelt added that a cut to the town’s local aid was also expected to impact this year’s budget. “We expect a cut to local aid. So we worked off of last year’s local aid numbers, and then cut the general by 14 percent.” He said while local aid had been cut, Chapter 70 funding had not.

Chapter 70 funding, according to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) “is the major program of state aid to public elementary and secondary schools.” DESE’s website says, “In addition to providing state aid to support school operations, it also establishes minimum spending requirements for each district and minimum requirements for each municipality’s share of school costs.”

Reichelt said Chapter 70 funding had not been cut in this year’s proposed budget as “in 2008-2009, the last time a recession rolled around, the feds stepped in to level off the Chapter 70 version of local aid.”

“So there is talk that that’s going to happen again, we hope it does happen, but if a larger cut needs to be made to that then we may be in some deeper trouble,” Reichelt explained. “We are building our assumption also that we’ll get about $1 million in CARES funding for Chapter 70, so that’s going to handle a lot of the raises for Chapter 70,” he said.

Should a significant portion of Chapter 70 funding need to be cut, Reichelt said the town would “most likely have to look at some layoffs.”

Other changes to the upcoming proposed budget was a cut to local revenue and no proposed capital projects. Reichelt said local revenue consisted of ”hotel [and] motel taxes.” He also explained the reason for not providing any capital projects in the proposed budget was “keeping the free cash available if things get worse than they are now.” Reichelt said at this time the town had “no recurring personnel expenses” on free cash. Instead, he said they had done something they had “worked away from in the past,” and put recurring equipment expenses on the free cash budget. He explained such expenses consisted of “police cars, IT, Chromebooks, that type of thing.”

“We’ve rolled that, in the past, off of free cash, and having it on general recurring tax dollars. This year, we put that back on free cash to free up some more money for personnel,” Reichelt explained.

Another change to the budget, he said, was the cutting of more than a dozen vacant positions. “At the same time, like I said, we cut that $1.5 million from the budget. That means about 14 and a half positions, vacant positions for personnel,” he said. Reichelt said the town wanted to bring back the positions in the future.

“Those mostly are positions we want to bring back in the future, they’re not ones we deem unnecessary. There are a few that we’ll get to as we get to department budgets that we won’t bring back, but a good majority of those we will want to bring back in the future,” Reichelt said. He added that “all the seasonal help and some central maintenance and DPW” positions had been cut as well.

Typically, Reichelt said, the town “usually look[s] to add things to the budget.” He said, “This year, we looked at about $2 million of stuff that we thought may be valuable, we cut all of that, so there’s nothing new really in the budget this year.”

In conclusion, he said, “It’s kind of a boring budget in that it’s last year’s budget with $1 million and a half cut out of it and no capital projects at the moment.”

Wilcox echoed this and said, “It’s very similar to last year’s budget, as you said, and we cut out what we could and took advantage of some vacant positions this year to get where we are.”

Reichelt said the budget would be overviewed and gone through “department by department and have some committee meetings and hearings on it.” However, he emphasized that it was important to “understand it is most likely last year’s budget and depending on what happens, most likely going to change if circumstances get worse.”

The public hearing for the budget will continue at the next city council meeting on June 1. The public can watch and participate in the public meeting to voice questions and concerns by dialing into the Zoom meeting by going online to Zoom.us and entering the meeting code (865 8231 6011) or by dialing 1-929-205-6099 and entering the meeting code.

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