Scarborough’s proposed $82.5 million town and school budget comes with an estimated 4.4% property tax increase.
The combined budget for the new fiscal year is up 7.4%, due in large part to inflation, according to Town Manager Tom Hall, but it also includes a $1.36 million investment in the second phase of the Spurwink Road improvement project, $53,000 to add a second social services coordinator to town staff and $550,000 for the replacement of the town’s catch basin truck.
The $53.3 million school portion of the budget includes $1 million to add a teacher and two ed techs for English Language Learners and four other special services ed techs, said Superintendent Geoffrey Bruno, and accounts for rising costs for staff salaries and health insurance. The budget also factors in an additional $1.5 million in state aid that was announced Tuesday.
“Inflationary pressures are certainly a recurring theme in this budget,” Hall said at Wednesday’s Town Council meeting. “All of us appreciate it at a household level, but (the town is) not immune.”
The municipal budget accounts for increases of $780,000 for wages, $240,000 for fuel costs and $100,000 for health insurance, Hall said.
The new catch basin truck “is a critical piece of infrastructure” for the town, he said.
“It sounds a little simple, but replacement of the catch basin truck – that single piece of equipment probably does more to assure our compliance with our stormwater permits in terms of cleaning silt and debris,” he told the council.
The combined $82,446,529 budget proposal would raise the property tax rate 68 cents to $16.07 per $1,000 of assessed value. The owner of a home assessed at $400,000 would pay $6,428 in property taxes, $272 more than this year. The ongoing revaluation in town could alter that assessment, Hall said.
In total, capital spending for school and town projects is up nearly 80%, but that includes $137.5 million set aside for a new consolidated school project that is still in the early planning stage and would require voters’ approval.
“That skews that number tremendously,” Hall said. “Taking that out, it’s about $10 million (in capital projects).”
The school budget is up 4.6% from this year. Roughly 80% of the budget is staff-related, Bruno said, and that includes a $1.8 million increase in wages and over $1 million for new staff investment, including the new English Language Learner positions.
“Students who don’t natively speak English are coming, in some cases, to our schools (speaking) little or no English at all,” Bruno told the council.
Other drivers include the absence of federal funding to schools that were provided during the pandemic, Bruno said, along with inflation.
The school department reduced some costs in the new budget, shaving off $43,000 for contracted transportation, $35,000 for online and internet services and $22,000 in electricity and heating oil.
On Tuesday night, the state announced it had made an error in calculating the amount of state funding school districts would receive for the new school year. Scarborough will receive another $1.5 million, an unexpected addition that had staff scrambling Wednesday to factor that into their budget.
“They must have known I was presenting this evening and planned accordingly,” Bruno joked.
The council’s first reading of the municipal budget is scheduled for April 19, followed by a school board public hearing on its portion of the budget on April 28. The council will hold a public hearing May 17, followed by a final vote and adoption on June 7, before sending the school budget to voters later that month.
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