Millerton budget gets the final OK

MILLERTON — It’s official. The Millerton budget for 2015-16 was formally adopted by the Village Board at a special meeting on Tuesday, April 14, at Village Hall, following a public hearing that drew no members of the public.“The budget is balanced,” said village Trustee Christine Bates. “We’re not spending any more money than we spent last year. It’s under the [state] property tax cap.”The Village Board was able to adopt a $641,072.86 budget with a -0.03 tax levy change. The amount to be raised by taxes is $391,027.42.“I feel good about it because we’re still in tough times and I think a lot of people are still struggling to get back on their feet,” said Millerton Mayor Marty Markonic. “And I want to make it as easy as possible for people to get back in the swing of things. We don’t want to put any more burden on people than we have to. “I believe in efficiency, so if we can be efficient that’s the best way,” he added. “I think in general government, not necessarily small government but big government, has a lot of waste, and the bigger you get the bigger the waste there is. So I’m a true believer in small government, and on the local scale I feel good about being able to not hit the taxpayers with an increase.”Cost savers included not manning the pool at Eddie Collins Park this summer. The pool is in rough shape and in need of major repairs. While the board considers its options — repairing, rebuilding or removing the pool all together — it’s saving on lifeguard salaries, pool maintenance fees and operational costs.“It was kind of sad to close the pool for the season, but we’ve been nursing it along for the last decade, and it started getting to the point where it’s not only not safe but also very costly to run it,” said Markonic. “So we’re going to get the whole year to basically look into our options on that.”In the meantime, Bates said, swimmers can go to Rudd Pond in the town of North East. That’s where the village’s summer camp program relocated last year.“There will be lifeguards at Rudd Pond,” she said. “The state has them there on weekends, when campers are at the park, and we have them during the week at [summer] camp.”Soon it will be registration time for summer camp, which runs through July and the beginning of August.Getting back to the budget, there were some salary raises, but not for elected officials.“Once again the Village Board and the mayor had no salary increases,” said Bates. “And employees received a 2 percent salary increase.”The village managed to hold the line on health insurance costs, which Bates said also helped keep the tax levy low.There were some additional municipal costs related to the village water department. This year the village changed over to a private contractor to operate the water district.“It was definitely an adjustment year because we switched to a private company for water,” said the mayor. “And it so happens that during the same year we had a lot of water main breaks. Normally we have a couple, but we had a few this year and I don’t ever remember having the water main freeze. So that was a new one.”The village will need to map its water district if it wants to save money in the future; doing so will cost, though.“We’re slowly in the process of getting the system so it’s very, very user friendly,” said Markonic. “Our big thing this year is that we have to get the whole system mapped, because there’s very poor mapping of the other water lines and a lot of water valves are buried under the blacktop. It costs a tremendous amount of money more to shut off the water line to 11 valves to get the water to stop [in one valve] because we don’t have maps in our hands.”The mayor said sometimes the village has to have workers with metal detectors on the streets to find the ancient water valves — a less than ideal approach. That’s why the village will soon work with Dutchess County and Rural Water to trace the lines and then design a map. The project may have to be done in phases, according to Markonic, as other infrastructure work still needs to get done. Repairing many of the deteriorating sidewalks on village streets is at the top of the list.