The Clay Town Board held an informational hearing on its tentative budget Monday Oct. 17 at its regular meeting. Town comptroller John Shehadi offered a brief summary of the $12,166,584 budget initially presented by Supervisor Damian Ulatowski at the board’s last meeting.
“We have done everything we can to try to maintain costs as much as we can to keep things down,” Ulatowski said. “We are trying to get under the governor’s tax cap and deliver a budget to the residents of the town of Clay on the order of [a] 3.4 percent [increase over last year’s budget], and that’s still not finalized.”
Under Ulatowski’s proposed budget, a homeowner with a $100,000 house outside the village of North Syracuse can expect to pay $8.14 more than 2010. Inside the village, a taxpayer with a $100,000 home will pay $25 more than last year. Ulatowski said he hoped to further decrease those numbers over the next several weeks; the board has until Nov. 20 to adopt a budget.
As it stands, in 2011, the town has cut four positions. It has also secured a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, which was applied at the old town hall facility, now the highway garage, to increase energy efficiency. In addition, at the Oct. 17 meeting, the board approved an amendment to the budget correcting a salary downward, reducing the budget by an additional $1,200.
“I think the board is being very proactive in trying to bring sustainability to the town of Clay and delivering to you a budget that I think you can all embrace without a huge and heavy tax burden,” Ulatowski said.
Shehadi went over some of the specifics of the budget, particularly the special districts budgets. He noted that there were no increases in the fire and water budgets for the town.
“Everything’s pretty much status quo,” Shehadi said.
The board voted to approve the tentative budget as the preliminary budget, meaning that it will be presented again before the public on Nov. 7. The public will have a chance to speak out on the budget at that time.
In other business:
Several neighbors from Plum Hollow appeared before the board to ask for assistance with a pump station that they said regularly backs up, causing flooding in their basements as well as a sewage smell. The Onondaga County Water Authority has been out several times to clean it up, but the residents are looking for a more permanent solution.
“It smells, it makes a lot of noise and it’s backed up in my basement three wonderful times,” said Yvonne Lore. “It’s time to take care of it.”
“The smell is horrendous,” said Martha Heimlich. “We can’t even sit on our front porch a lot of times.”
The neighbors said that the trouble started when the pump station in Wildcreek was shut down about 15 years ago when Plum Hollow was built. The station is overloaded, they said; it can’t handle the load of both neighborhoods.
“To be honest, we were not expecting you all to be here tonight,” Ulatowski said. “We did not prepare ourselves to set this up as a public hearing.”
After hearing some of the residents’ questions, Ulatowski said he and town engineer Ron DeTota will look into the issue and get back to the residents once they have more information.
