#MiddleburyCT #TownBudget
By MARJORIE NEEDHAM
It’s budget season and town and school district officials are hard at work preparing 2026-2027 budgets that will be voted on Wednesday, May 6, 2026, in the annual budget referendum. Middlebury First Selectwoman Jennifer Mahr and CFO Seth Bernstein have spent hours chipping away at the town’s budget to get its increase down to a level palatable to voters.
Their starting point was department head requests that would have led to a 12.29% budget increase. On the first pass, by the February 9 Board of Selectmen meeting, they had reduced that increase to 8.63%. On the second pass, between February 9 and the Board of Finance/Board of Selectmen joint meeting February 11, they got the increase down to 3.29%.
Mahr presented the first pass results to the Board of Selectmen at their February 9 meeting, which Board of Finance Chairman Vincent Cipriano attended. She explained the BoS’s responsibility to prepare a budget to recommend to the Board of Finance. She noted some increases are unavoidable, noting the payments for the second fire truck and the increases in FICA taxes (due to salary increases) as examples.
She then went through the entire BoS budget as of February 6 department by department, noting where cuts had been made and also where cuts could not be made due to contractual or other obligations. She said increases for five items accounted for $776,681 of the $1.16 million budget increase: medical insurance ($365,000), contractual changes ($155,038), a fire truck lease ($152,167), FICA taxes ($54,476) and the new Homestead Exemption ($50,000), which would require hiring a new employee. That’s because each application involves processing eight or nine documents.
By February 11, additional budget cuts dropped the increase to $443,215. The budget has dropped from an initial $15.1 million to $14.6 million on February 9 and to $13.9 million on February 11, a total reduction of $1.2 million.
As of February 11, items gone entirely from the budget are the poet laureate stipend of $750, the half-time human resources salary of $27,576 plus $2,100 in FICA taxes, the Homestead Exemption employee at $50,000 plus $3,800 in FICA taxes and the Code Red service at $6,300. Mahr told this reporter she believes Everbridge, which is used by the state, would work better for the town. Since this article was published in the March print issue, Mahr said Code Red is midway through a three-year contract and cannot be cut at this time.
Discussing the cuts at the February 11 meeting, she said there were some she was not happy with. She said one was cutting the human resources position. She said CFO Bernstein is doing the work right now, but he is busy and shouldn’t have this burden. She also noted there is a current HR complaint filed by the person who used to have this job, and the town may be obligated to hire them back.
Under assessment, she noted we have committed to implementing the Homestead ordinance and hiring a person at $50,000 is a double hit on the budget because we are paying someone to process papers to help us collect less tax money. She said one of the options is for the town to delay the Homestead act for another year or repeal it. She noted New Milford hired three people to handle its paperwork.
She said a lot of the cuts are cuts she would rather not make, but they were made to bring the budget increase down to less than 4%. “All I’m doing is showing you the impact of [them],” she said, noting you may save money while losing the service of a department. “That’s a hit,” she said.
She said the union requires a mandatory six hours for opening and closing a building on the weekends or holidays. A recent two-day event at Shepardson for which a group was not charged cost the town $1,000 in overtime to open and close the building Saturday and Sunday. She said a change would require negotiations with the union.
The Parks and Rec Department does not charge credit card fees and has been eating about $5,200 in credit card fees while most other town departments pass on that cost to customers. Tacking on those credit card fees would give a potential $5,200 saving.
Residents interested in the town budget can attend the Wednesday, March 11, Board of Finance meeting at 7 p.m. in the Town Hall Conference Room or the Wednesday, March 18, joint meeting of the Board of Selectmen and Board of Finance at 7 p.m. in the Town Hall Conference Room. The public hearing on the budget that will appear on the May 6 ballot will be Tuesday, April 7, at 6:30 p.m. in the Larkin Room at the Middlebury Public Library.
