It is amazing how our taxes
never seem to go down. That is because the town uses the old
Russian tactic “two steps forward, one step back.” They start out with all the Department Heads
budgeting EVERYTHING they want in their initial proposed budgets. Once this number has been established this is
the starting point, instead of using last year’s approved departmental budgets
as the starting point.
Here is the proof, look at
the attachment and you will see for FY16 the approved budget was for
$8,098,109.00 (yes that is over 8 million).
Now, look at the initial FY17 proposed budget of $8,775,482.00 (yes that
is over 8 million). The initial proposed
FY17 was already an increase of $677,373.00 before you start cutting. So after the cuts, the town has it down to
$8,604, 533.00 which is still an
increase of $506,424.00 for next year.
To show you how crazy this is
let’s look at the increase from FY15 to FY16.
The approved budget for FY15 is $6,156,593.00 and the FY16 approved
budget was $8,098,109.00 which according to my calculator is $1,941,516.00. This is close to a 2 million dollar increase
in one year and for what? The town of Lisbon cannot afford to
support these massive increases in operating cost every year.
When you add the increase on the municipal
side of $506,424.00 with the School side increase of $482,058.00; the increase
for this year will be $988,482.00. This
is close to another million dollars in one year. Is there any doubt as to why your taxes go up
every year? So how do we stop this
insane tradition of spending? We need
everyone to come to the Town Council meetings and tell the Council to put a
stop to it. Call your Councilors and
tell them this is not acceptable.
As you can see, the initial
proposal is the two steps forward and the approved budget is the one step
back. This is the reason your taxes are
so high and are continuing to go up every year.
In
order to control the excessive spending, there should be a mandatory directive
that these Department Heads on the municipal side have to cut 15% of their
operating cost each year until there budget is at 6 million dollars like it was
in FY15.
Larry Fillmore