ORANGE — Voters will decide Monday whether to fully fund this year’s town budget. If the Proposition 2½ override passes, the $21 million budget will stay in place. If the vote fails, cuts will have to be made to balance the budget.
The election is Monday, July 29, at the Orange Armory. Polls will be open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
The override vote is to raise the additional money needed to fund the town’s operating budget for this fiscal year, which began July 1.
The override has nothing to do with the school building project to replace Dexter Park Innovation School. That project is expected to be 80 percent funded by the state, and residents should not expect to vote on that project until the Annual Town Meeting in 2020.
Proposition 2½ is a state statute that limits annual tax increases to 2½ percent. An override is required to allow a town to raise real estate and personal property taxes more than that. It must be approved as a ballot question at an election.
The ballot question for the override reads as follows: “Shall the Town of Orange be allowed to assess an additional $513,972.00 in real estate and personal property taxes for the purposes of funding the Town’s operating budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 2019?”
Orange voters passed a Finance Committee-recommended $21,353,712 budget at the Annual Town Meeting in June. However, that number exceeds town revenues, hence the need for the override vote.
That was a 6.2 percent increase over last year’s budget of $20,103,315.92. By comparison, the increase in the year before was only about 2 percent.
According to Finance Committee Chairman Keith LaRiviere, this is the year to “bite the bullet” and pass an override, since town departments’ requested operating budgets have been continuously cut in recent years.
“The typical result of the budget process is we’ve been increasing the school budgets and pretty much relentlessly cutting the budgets of the rest of the departments in town, and if we’re going to keep the town functioning … we think we need to bite the bullet this year and raise another half-million dollars,” LaRiviere said at the Annual Town Meeting on June 17.
According to LaRiviere, since the 2013 fiscal year, the budget has increased by about $605,000 per year on average, while revenue has increased by an average $231,252 during that same time.
Most of the increase to the budget this year came from the increases to education costs, which is common for Massachusetts municipalities. Other increasing costs were driven by inflation, employee wage increases and insurance.
Orange’s elementary schools were given the largest increase of any line item, $300,000, which is still less than the original $600,000 increase — 9 percent — requested, and in part is to pay for 11 new staff who were hired mid-school year.
If the override vote fails, the town will have to schedule a Special Town Meeting by Sept. 15 to balance the budget.
Orange Elementary School Committee member Alex Schwanz previously told the Finance Committee that an override vote failure would result in the schools cutting “about four staff members,”up to five total. Classes would likely be consolidated in the higher grades, resulting in more students per class, he said — 25 students per class in the fourth through sixth grades, as opposed to 22 or 23 currently.
As a point of reference, the Finance Committee explained how a successful override would affect taxes on a property valued at $200,000. If the override vote passes, a property valued at $200,000 in Orange would pay a $4,790 tax bill instead of the $4,590 without the override. The tax rate for the fiscal year that concluded June 30 is $22.52, which would amount to a $4,478 bill for a property valued at $200,000.
Reach David McLellan at dmclellan@recorder.com or 413-772-0261, ext. 268.