From the Newtown Bee, 3/7/2025
“Discusses Tough Budget Year“

To the Editor:

Newtown’s taxpayers are staring at a 6.8 percent increase in their property taxes next year, assuming the Board of Finance and Legislative Council make no reductions to the proposed budget before it goes to referendum in April.

I don’t know if Newtown’s taxpayers would be happy about that. It’s a staggering increase compared to prior years and it’s going to pose a challenge to many of our neighbors, especially those on fixed incomes.

Why is this year’s increase so high? I know costs for insurance and electricity are way up. Contractual salaries always increase, and it seems like we always need to buy new police cars, put a roof on a building, fix a bridge, and pave roads that fall into disrepair.

Looking at the past, adopted budgets and tax rates in Newtown, aside from two revaluation years (which makes it difficult to calculate year over year increases in the mill rate), the average annual mill rate increase since 2015-16 was 0.92%, much less than inflation. There were two years (2020-21 and 2021-22) when the mill rate actually decreased. That means you paid lower taxes than the prior year. These small increases, while helpful, have delayed spending.

No elected official wants to raise taxes, and I suspect some unfortunate decisions were made along the way that artificially kept our mill rate low.

All these years of low tax increases have finally caught up to us. Our town’s cash balance is way down, not to the point where we’re going to run out of money, but we no longer have a cushion. We don’t have budget surpluses so we can’t use the leftover money from one year to offset taxes the next as has been past practice.

The first selectman did not include contingency money in his budget for next year. He will have to find money elsewhere if an unforeseen expense occurs. And it always does.

I don’t envy our Board of Finance and Legislative Council members. They have an impossible job to do this year given the numbers. What we need from everyone is transparency and honest budgeting so that next year we aren’t in the same predicament.

Joseph Bojnowski
Newtown