budget

Berne has released its tentative 2021 budget, providing the first comprehensive look at the town’s mid-pandemic finances.

Rensselaerville Town Board

Spending is down in Rensselaerville’s tentative 2021 budget, but only by a margin, and revenues are likewise only down a touch, leaving a budget that’s much the same as the budget the town board adopted in 2020. 

The town of Berne is being audited by the New York State Comptroller after Councilman Joel Willsey, the board’s lone Democrat, complained about the formulation of the town’s 2020 budget.

A state audit has revealed that Knox Town Clerk Traci Schanz failed to deposit more than 300 fee collections within the legally required timeframes and made reporting errors that left the town with an unremitted cash balance of more than $3,000, according to a report from the Office of the New York State Comptroller. Schanz said she is grateful for what she learned from the audit and new procedures have been put in place.

In Knox’s first town board meeting physically open to the public since the coronavirus settled in March, Supervisor Vasilios Lefkaditis assured residents that the town is in strong financial standing despite projected sales-tax loss, which he credits to the town’s robust cash balance.

For 2020-21, the Voorheesville Public Library is proposing a $1.35 million budget, an increase of nearly 7 percent from this year.

“We have been challenged to not only reinvent what we do for an online platform, but innovate at the same time,” said Timothy Wiles, director of the Guilderland Public Library. The library is proposing a $4 million budget, drafted before the coronavirus shutdown. Residents of the Guilderland Central School district will vote through mail-in ballots that must be returned by June 9.

Westerlo Supervisor William Bichteman laid out a worst-case-scenario fiscal plan Tuesday that would see the 2021 tax levy increase anywhere from 10- to 15-percent. Bichteman stressed that the scenario was projected using “best-guess” budgeting based on a lack of information regarding sales-tax revenue from higher levels of government and that the probabilities are almost entirely unknown, but that he wants to start having the conversation before it’s too late.

“I think it’s the unpredictability that is the challenge here, trying to plan for something that we don’t really know what it’s going to look like or what our needs are going to be,” said Guilderland schools Superintendent Marie Wiles, discussing next year’s budget. “I do think we’re going to need more resources, not less as we open the school year.”

The Berne-Knox-Westerlo Board of Education voted this week, 5 to 0, to accept Superintendent Timothy Mundell’s proposed $23.4 million budget. 

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