LIVERMORE FALLS – Town departments were open and it was business as usual again Tuesday morning after voters approved all articles at Monday night’s special town meeting.
Well, mostly usual.
Town Manager Martin Puckett spent much of the day in meetings, trying to get a handle on the new budget.
Dispatcher Megan Gordon got pats on the back from the officers coming in and out of the police department.
“We’re pretty much like family here, so everybody was relieved to know we get to stick together,” she said.
Transfer station manager Fred Nadeau spent Tuesday relaxing and getting ready to open the station at 8 this morning for the first time since the end of June.
“I’ve been puttering around the dooryard” and visiting with family and the folks who called or dropped by to congratulate him on getting to keep his job.
More than 300 people withstood sweltering summer heat Monday night to vote in a new budget that’s nearly 5 percent higher than it was last year, according to Puckett.
Last month, a dispute with selectmen led to a vote that denied funding to town departments rather than giving selectmen their way.
Without funding, all non-emergency departments were closed from June 1 until June 11. Police stopped making their rounds, and instead responded only to emergency calls. The recreation department’s summer program closed, leaving parents of enrolled children to fend for themselves. The town office closed, along with the transfer station, the library and the highway department.
Selectmen had proposed shutting down the transfer station and the dispatch service. Their plan was to farm dispatch out to Jay and Androscoggin County and pay Jay to take Livermore Falls trash directly, instead of through the transfer station. The two changes would have saved the town between $150,000 and $250,000, which selectmen proposed putting toward capital improvements.
Residents wanted to keep the two services and were furious with selectmen for not giving them the choice in the town warrant. Monday, the warrants were written using open-ended questions that allowed voters to agree on a budget themselves.
They voted to keep the dispatch service in a very close vote. The margin was much wider when they voted to keep the transfer station open, but not pay for improvements to the facility. They approved administrative articles, but voted to decrease the size of Treasurer Kristal Flagg’s raise and to refuse funding to an upgrade to the town’s accounting and car registration system.
When all was said and done, Puckett said, “there was an approximately 5 percent increase over last year’s budget.” Because the town will be paying less to the school system and because revenues are higher than they were last year, “our mill rate should be pretty close to last year.”
“I’m happy we finally have a budget,” Puckett said. Townspeople obviously value the municipal services they fought so hard to keep, he said.
“Our employees should be very proud. There have been nothing but compliments on how well the dispatch is doing, and the same thing with the transfer station,” he said.
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