ROCKLAND – Despite cutting operational expenses, City Manager James Chaousis II presented the FY2017 proposed budget for the city of Rockland with a 2.5 percent increase. The $12,397,523 budget reflects a downturn in revenue and value and need to pay for Rockland’s aging infrastructure for the city prompting an increase in property taxes from $21.20 per $1,000 of assessed value to $21.69.  

In his opening statement to the Rockland City Council April 20, Chaousis said he was proud of the work the budget working group did in figuring out a way to pay for the city’s municipal services.

“We worked really hard over the past few months to put together a fiscally responsible budget that prioritizes long term investment in Rockland,” he said.

In a prepared statement, Chaousis said the budget represents positive change in Rockland, investing in services programs, infrastructure and facilities that will make Rockland a sustainable and vibrant community now and into the future.

The budget reflects full staffing of the police, fire and library. The statement said there is no fine print or omissions.

The entire budget is available online for the first time.

http://www.ci.rockland.me.us/vertical/sites/%7BDE9EDD66-EFF4-4A6B-8A58-AA91254C1584%7D/uploads/City_Managers_Budget_FY_17.pdf

“The budget is very comprehensive this year,” said Chaousis. “It is very anecdotal and reads like a book.”

Rockland Mayor Louise MacLellen-Ruf pointed out the budget brings responsibility to the city.

“It’s interesting because for people to wrap their minds around what it means when we defer things, year after year after year,” she said. “Eventually, at some point, we’ve got to pay the piper and it looks like this year is the year we’re going to start it.”

Councilor Valli Geiger said she would be taking a close look at the schools portion of the budget.  

“The school portion of the budget is 56 percent, so I’ll be looking at that,” she said. “If it’s a huge increase like what was proposed last year it makes a significant impact. One of the interesting things is that we worked like crazy last year to keep our rate at zero and we took a lot of heat for that and we lost a lot of services for that. And then you read people’s comments that they raised taxes again this year, so I felt like we probably shouldn’t have kept it at zero last year. We’re going to take the heat either way and what it meant was that we did not put any money in our capital infrastructure fund and I just don’t think we can keep doing that. What I want is tiny increases, but start rebuilding the infrastructure of the city.”

In an interview before the presentation of the budget to the city council Chaousis said the 2.54 percent increase tells almost none of the story behind the budget.

“We didn’t want to just throw out the document and not know how we intended it to be read,” he said. “The press and the public always want to know how much more. We put that right our front. There’s more than a half million dollars in expenditure reduction.”

Chaousis said that even though there are expenditure reductions there are that much more in revenue reductions.

“These are things we’ve been talking about for the last few years,” he said. “The city’s ability to raise money in other ways other than a tax levy. Putting those two things together gives us a very frugal budget, but it barely keeps up with the fact that revenues are going away.”

Chaousis said that contracting out legal services would be one way to save money. He said that was the way other municipalities did it. The move would eliminate the city attorney’s position. 

“The biggest reduction is proposing legal in a different way,” he said. “Legal services has a significant price tag to it, it costs a lot. We propose doing it in a different way, so that reflects a significant reduction in those costs.”

Chaousis said they put it in as a budgetary concept and it is for the council to decide. Chaousis also said there has been the creation of a new position with a volunteer coordinator.

“They would work for the community development office and it would be their job to put together volunteer programs to help us build value,” he said. “Finding volunteers for the library, or the fire department, there are lots of avenues where someone can volunteer their time with the city. This person would try to craft volunteer programs around that.”

Chaousis said that anything provided for by city services costs the city money. Anything that volunteers can do will be a lot cheaper than staff, so finding ways to compliment those things are very important.

A large proposed expense in the budget concerns information technology infrastructure, the city manager said.

“That’s been deferred from previous years of not doing it,” he said. “We think we found a way to weave those together, so we can have a really quick budget acceptance and move on to provide good city services.”

Chaousis said that the budget provides a plan.

“What we’ll say is that if accepted, here’s day one,” he said. “We’ll execute it to a T and at the end of the year we’ll come back and report how well we did.”

The budget now goes before the city council for final approval set for Monday, June 27. Review is set to begin Wednesday, April 27, and run every Wednesday at 5;30 p.m.