Town, school budgets set

The Waterbury Select Board may defer putting money into some of the town’s capital improvement funds this year if that will help keep the property-tax rate down.

“This seems like a place where we could cut,” board Chairwoman Rebecca Ellis said at a meeting Monday.

Town Manager Bill Shepeluk will present the entire proposed budget at a meeting Monday.

Duxbury

Duxbury’s 2012 town budget totals $712,371, including a $90,000 deposit into a capital reserve fund and $52,500 in escrow for spending on sand and gravel.

The resulting tax rate is still uncertain because town auditors have not yet pinpointed the budget surplus from 2011, said town Treasurer Ken Scott. In 2010 and 2011, the town carried over roughly $133,000 and $121,000 from the previous year, and used the money to offset taxes.

Without any surplus, the budget would result in a municipal tax rate of 48.79 cents for every $100 of property value, or $1,463.70 for a $300,000 house. That doesn’t include school taxes. Voters consider the budget March 6.

School districts

• The Waterbury-Duxbury School Board has approved a $9,817,114 budget for 2012-130, up almost $490,000, 5.25 percent, from current spending. The increase results partly from adopting full-day kindergarten, adding enrichment for third- and fourth-graders, and paying for all fifth- and sixth-graders to attend an ecology field trip in Maine. 

Each addition boosts teaching and learning, said Tom Drake, principal of Crossett Brook Middle School. The field trip, which some of the public has questioned, is “an integral part of our curriculum,” he said.

Waterbury-Duxbury expects a budget surplus of almost $300,000 from this school year, and that money will lower the school-tax increase to 2.9 percent.

• The Harwood Union School Board approved a 2012-13 budget of $12,092,615, up less than 1 percent from current spending. The budget eliminates a full-time English teacher job at the high school. 

Towns pay school taxes according to the percentage of students each has in the district. 

For Waterbury, the homestead tax rate is estimated at $1.320 for every $100 in property value, while the nonresidential rate is $1.390. For Duxbury, the estimated homestead tax rate is $1.402 per $100 in property value, and the nonresidential rate is $1.461.