By Rich Pollack
Highland Beach voters maintain the final say on the town’s big-ticket purchases, but commissioners can now sign off on spending up to roughly $1 million on a single item or project without a referendum.
Commissioners voted to change the town charter, raising the trigger on how much the commission can spend without going to voters. The previous $350,000 limit was lifted to 10 percent of the town’s operating budget — or about $1 million this year against a budget of $10.4 million.
The commission’s 4-1 vote, with Mayor Bernard Featherman dissenting, follows weeks of discussion that included several proposals ranging from leaving the cap at $350,000 to dropping it altogether.
Initially, commissioners considered a proposal from the town’s Charter Review Committee that would have brought the spending limit to 10 percent of the operating budget. That proposal, however, would have required a majority commission vote for projects up to 7 percent and a supermajority 4-1 vote for projects of between 7 percent and 10 percent.
Committee members said the plan was the result of an informal survey showing that Highland Beach was the only community in the area that required a referendum on expenditures.
After rejecting that committee’s proposal as too complicated, commissioners then gave tentative approval to a simplified plan that would have allowed the commission to authorize spending of any amount with just a majority vote.
That proposal met with opposition from residents, including retired attorney Al Kraft and resident Carl Feldman, who brought to the commission a petition, signed by 200 residents in three days, in favor of not changing the cap.
During discussions, Commissioner Dennis Sheridan offered a compromise proposal of setting the cap at 10 percent of the operating budget. The proposal initially failed to receive three votes, but was later brought back to the commission and approved after Commissioner Doris Trinley reconsidered.
Sheridan said he presented the compromise after receiving calls from concerned residents. “The idea of not having anything in the charter and giving free rein to the commission was not what they wanted,” he said.
Throughout the discussions, town officials noted that the $350,000 referendum trigger equated to about 10 percent of the operating budget when it was put in the charter several years ago.
For his part, Kraft says the new charter language is a step in the right direction, although he doesn’t think it goes quite far enough.
“I think they could have come up with a better resolution which doesn’t diverge as much from the original position,” he said.
At an earlier meeting, commissioners gave final approval to the town’s 2012-13 budget, which includes a tax rate of $3.95 per $1,000 of taxable property value, up from $3.40 in the current budget.
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