News

By Dan Moffett

    South Palm Beach taxpayers will see some eye-popping numbers when they look at their town’s proposed budget for 2017-18.
    But the large figures come with back-stories that help put them in perspective.
    Yes, the town has listed $6 million on its budget for rebuilding the aging Town Hall. And there’s also $1.5 million for a beach stabilization project.
    For a town that runs on a total budget of just under $10 million, these would be huge expenditures. But the price tags for both projects are deceiving.
    The $6 million for a new Town Hall is a ballpark estimate on what it would take to reconstruct the building from the ground up. The Town Council is waiting on an architect’s final report to decide what to do. Council members could choose to replace the building, renovate some of it at a much lower cost or forget the whole idea and live with the existing structure.
    “It may be that nothing happens at all,” says Vice Mayor Robert Gottlieb.
    If the council does choose replacement, the roughly $6 million would come from a bond referendum that voters would have to approve — a prospect that likely is many months away.
    Then there’s the $1.5 million for beach stabilization. The town actually has been setting aside that money for years but now is moving it into a spending account for possible action. The hope is the project to install groins along the shoreline could begin in November 2018.
    But that isn’t a certainty either. The plan still needs to obtain permits from a variety of overseeing federal and state agencies — and also faces possible legal challenges from neighboring communities, among them Manalapan.
    The numbers that are solid and reliable in the proposed budget tell an encouraging story for the town.
    South Palm Beach expects $9.8 million in revenues and $9.5 million in expenditures, creating a surplus of close to $300,000.
    Property values have gone up again this year, rising about 6.5 percent and adding $20 million to the town’s taxable value. South Palm Beach was one of the slowest communities in the county to recover property value from the recession but has finally caught up to where it was a decade ago with $305 million on the tax rolls.
    The future looks bright, too, with construction beginning on the 3550 South Ocean project on the old Palm Beach Oceanfront Inn site. Once built and sold, probably two years from now, the 30 luxury condominiums there could raise the town’s taxable value by at least 25 percent.
    More good news: Town Manager Bob Vitas says the penny sales tax increase that county voters approved in November “is tracking on target” and bringing a steady stream of revenue to the town for infrastructure improvements — about $83,500 a year.
    During a budget workshop on July 11, council members gave preliminary approval to maintaining the town’s current tax rate of $4.13 per $1,000 of assessed value, or roughly 6 percent above the rollback rate of $3.87 that would keep tax revenues flat.