GREENFIELD — Mayor William Martin admitted during a City Council committee meeting this week that the numbers provided in the budget for school resource officers was $101,000 more than expected.
The mistake was explained during Martin’s presentation of the proposed budget to the council’s Ways and Means Committee Tuesday. According to Martin, the amount will be removed from the budget and will not be used elsewhere.
According to Martin, as he and his staff were preparing the budget, a clerical error was made and $215,000 was requested for the two school resource officers. The total should have been $114,000.
The amount would reduce the proposed public safety budget increase to $325,816. It would also reduce the expected increase to the entire city budget from 1.34 percent to 1.13 percent.
Martin said after the meeting that the budget would be amended to remove the total and he would not allocate the erroneous total elsewhere.
According to Finance Director Elizabeth Braccia, however, Martin may not be able to remove the figure. Instead, an amendment would have to be submitted to the council to be voted on, and the council would decide on the change. Then, based on Massachusetts General Law and the town charter, section 5-6(c), the council could move the funds to the school department.
If an amendment is accepted, Martin noted that the reduced amount will reduce the expected tax increase of residents, though he was uncertain what the new number would be.
Residents were expecting a tax increase of $0.29 per $1,000.
In addition to the clerical error, Martin admitted that the budget book, which helps city councilors assess the budget, was delivered late. According to Martin, this was due to the size of the project.
It’s possible that this budget question will be taken up Tuesday or Wednesday.
Martin and Braccia discussed other aspects of the budget, highlighting notable decreases and increases in various city departments.
Braccia said that there would be a reduction in the council budget due to the impending retirement of city clerk Deborah Tuttle.
According to Braccia, the mayor’s office hired two administrative assistants and created a third administrative assistant position into a director of administration, resulting in a $70,305 increase in the executive department.
The operations support line item also saw $21,913 increase, which Braccia said was mostly due to a transfer of an employee and a 7.5 hour-a-week increase of the position they were transferred to.
The education budget saw a nominal increase, totaling $22,675, or 0.12 percent of its budget, and was “essentially level-funded,” Braccia said. According to Braccia, Martin suggested that the school department could seek alternative funding sources in order to meet its request for more money.
Miscellaneous was expected to see the largest increase at $278,355, but was a relatively small increase compared to its budget of over $12.28 million. The biggest increase here was $227,700 contributed to employee retirement, Braccia noted. The total also includes unemployment costs and insurance costs for employees of the city.
The largest decrease was in debt service, which reduced by $346,754. This reduction was due to a debt that was paid off in the previous fiscal year.
The “other general government” line item saw the second-largest decrease in the budget at $39,577, which Braccia explained was because of an expected combination of staffing between departments that didn’t happen.