By Gretchen Webster

WESTPORT — As planning for the 2023-24 budget gets underway, Board of Finance members Wednesday outlined expectations for spending plans expected to require higher taxes because of inflationary pressures.

“We’re going to have increases of 4 to 8 percent — 4 percent at least,” said board member Sheri Gordon

“It’s very important to set expectations with the public … To say there will be no tax rate increase isn’t reality,” she said.

“To maintain the same level of town services the town will have to spend more.”

The town’s current budget for 2022-23, with combined education and town spending, is nearly $223 million, an increase of just under 2 percent from the previous year.

During Wednesday’s Town Hall meeting attended by many of the town’s department heads, each Board of Finance member highlighted the budget items they believe are the most important to fashioning the next budget.

The town department budgets that require the most attention this year, finance members said, are the Parks and Recreation Department budget, where they noted revenue can be generated through user fees; the funding for renovation of the town’s fire stations; money for the transportation budget, whatever form that may take, and a case review of health-care plans for town employees. 

The board also agreed the process to examine the annual budget presented by the Board of Education needs to be streamlined. Last year, finance board members were asking too many questions, according to member Brian Stern.  “It got into minutia,” he said.

“It’s not our job to get into how many pencils or textbooks are in the budget,” board member Lee Caney agreed.

James Foster, board vice chairman, said it’s important to ask town department heads not only how much funding they need to provide their department’s services, but also what their biggest challenges are in the new budget year. “We need to focus on the big items,” he said.

Several members noted that a larger 2023-24 budget does not mean that funds were mishandled or not enough care was taken to monitor the budget process. 

Finance member Nancie Dupier called the budget process “a combined effort” between all officials involved in crafting the spending plans.

“It’s not been that we haven’t invested in our town,” she said. “We’ve made it a good place to live [with] a good tax rate.”

The Board of Finance will meet with town department heads over the next four months to hammer out the finished budget before a tax rate is set in May for 2023-24.

Freelance writer Gretchen Webster, a Fairfield County journalist and journalism teacher for many years, was editor of the Fairfield Minuteman newspaper for 10 years and currently teaches journalism at Southern Connecticut State University.