THANKS TO MILAN’S REPUBLICANS,
TAXES IN TOWN ARE GOING UP 17% IN 2010
By Evelyn Bartin, December, 2009
In a Special Meeting held on November 18, 2009, Republican Supervisor Richard Barrett and Republican Town Board members Bobbi Egan and David Byrne – over the very loud objections of minority Democratic Town Board members Diane May and Ross Williams – voted, in a blatantly obvious action, to pad the 2010 budget for Milan by including several tens of thousands of dollars of pre-payments to the NYS Employees’ Retirement System. You can click here to see the NYS Retirement System Projection FYE 2011 that clearly states, :“THIS IS NOT A BILL”
Though Mr. Williams and Ms. May tried repeatedly to get their Republican counterparts to re-think this action, they were met with a wall of resistance. Please take a few minutes to watch this video clip from the meeting:
Adding insult to injury was the manner in which this move was thrust upon Milan’s tax-paying citizens: though this NYS Retirement Projection for 2011 was dated September 25, 2009 (and was confirmed by a Retirement System representative to have been sent to Mr. Barrett on October 1, 2009), Barrett claimed to have not received it until the day before the November 18th meeting, thus blind-siding everyone at the proverbial eleventh hour. (By law, the final budget had to be submitted by November 20th.) Click to watch the video:
Barrett/Egan/Byrne’s stunning ambush, combined with a continued refusal to bond a portion of the highway work, will result in the Town’s property owners having to shoulder significantly higher taxes next year: the tax rate will increase 17% on assessed property values in 2010 (to $1.96 per $1,000, or $588.90 for a $300,000 home, the average in Town); and the tax levy (the amount raised by property taxes) will increase 16.3%. (Owing to a math mistake presented by Barrett in the November 18th meeting, the tax levy increase was originally reported as 17.6 %.) For comparison, here are the tax levy increases for the nearby towns:
Pine Plains +5.0%
Red Hook
Village +2.7%
Town +2.3%
Rhinebeck
Village + 0%
Town + 0%
At a time when each of the Town Councils in the immediate area held the line with reasonable or no tax increases for their towns, Milan’s Republican majority saw fit to execute the egregious exception. Since every one of these towns faced, more or less, the same budget planning difficulties this year, the logical question is to ask why Milan’s governing Republicans chose this course of action. One theory is that the padding incorporated in the 2010 budget will provide the Town Board – which, upon the January 1st installation of its newest members, Bill Gallagher, Jack Campisi and Marion Mathison, will become all-Republican – with an excess that can then be cast as a tax decrease for 2011. Like the store management that marks everything up the night before a sale and then offers “50% off” the next day, this maneuver, if it comes to pass, will prove to be a decided manipulation of the Town’s finances and its citizens’ pockets and psyches – one that will be predictably spun into a campaigning plus in the 2011 election year.
You can click here to see the final Milan 2010 budget as it appears on the Town’s official web site: Budget 2010-2011 As an interesting note (and in support of the theorized intended plan to calculatedly link the 2010 and 2011 budgets as a future campaigning ploy), you might appreciate that on the home page of Town’s web site, the 2010 budget is noted as “2010 - 2011.” For the benefit of those of you who may not know, there is no such thing as a “2010 - 2011 budget!”
On the day after the meeting, Mr. Williams sent a sharply worded letter to the press in which he described the Republican majority’s actions to be “outrageous” and likely to have been orchestrated by Town Board member-elect, Jack Campisi. You can see the letter here Williams was subsequently interviewed by the local newspapers, and follow-up articles appeared in The Daily Freeman on November 20th (click here to read the article) and The Poughkeepsie Journal on December 4th (click here to read the article).
