News

By Mary Thurwachter

    With an anticipated property tax revenue increase of $182,866 this year, Lantana Town Council members may have thought they’d be able to spend money on “want and wish list” items, including building a 6-foot wall to surround the town’s operation center, replacing a police motorcycle and adding a police officer, dispatcher and part-time assistant at the library.
    But the prospect of any of those things happening looks bleak, council members learned during the town’s first budget workshop of the year on June 12.
    Instead, the extra $182,866 will be swallowed by sports complex expenses and pensions for Police Department employees.
    Although the sports complex brought in $40,000, four times what had been projected, operational costs for staff for the complex are about $275,000.
    “So, we’re bringing in $40,000 and it’s costing us a quarter of a million,” Mayor Dave Stewart said. “There goes the $183,000. Gone. History. Sayonara.”
    More bad news came when the council learned that pension costs for police officers jumped about a half million dollars, from about $415,000 to $904,992.
    “I want to know why, because $904,992 is over 30 percent of what we bring in in taxes,” Stewart said. “So, 30 percent of every dollar every person pays in this town doesn’t go to anything except pension costs for the Police Department.”
    Town Finance Director Stephen Kaplan said the state would kick in approximately $115,000 and there are the employees’ contributions to consider, as well.
    “Why did it go up a half million dollars in one year?” the mayor asked.
    Town Manager Deborah Manzo said the soaring increase in pension costs was necessary to comply with state law, mainly relating to a jump from 25 percent to 45 percent in disability costs. The percentage changed because “that’s what the law is and we have not been compliant with the law,” she said.
    Other factors in the increase, Manzo said, included cost-of- living increases, new mortality tables used in calculations, and the addition of two officers to the town’s force in the past year.
    “Now [pension costs] are like double of what it was,” Stewart said. “I can’t accept that.”
    Stewart said he wanted to propose adjusting town employees’ wages so “that out of 90 employees five years later you don’t have only 15 left.”
    “I guess,” Stewart said, “it goes back to the old Mick Jagger Rolling Stones song You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
    Projected general fund revenues for Lantana also include $560,000 from the 1-cent sales tax increase (although that money can be used only for infrastructure such as roads, bridges and drainage, and amenities such as parks), $568,000 from grants, plus a $100,000 transfer from the town’s insurance fund.
    The town will propose a tax rate during the second budget workshop on July 10. Lantana’s tax rate has been $3.24 per $1,000 of taxable value and is projected to stay the same for the 10th consecutive year, 2017-2018.
    But some council members suggested it may be time for an increase.
    “Everybody else raises it,” said Vice Mayor Lynn Moorhouse. “If [the rate] changed a hair probably a lot of these projects could go away. We’re not talking about a gazillion dollars, not when you’re looking at 3.2395. I know that’s set in stone for you, but things have changed over the past 25 years and this hasn’t. Just a thought.”
    The mayor didn’t respond, but council member Phil Aridas, who has favored a tax rate increase in the past, gave Moorhouse reason to hope.
    “That’s not set in stone for everybody that sits up here,” he said.