At a special meeting on October 30, the Lloyd Town Board officially voted to exceed the two-percent tax cap by a tally of 4 to 1, with Councilman Mike Guerriero the sole no vote. Councilwoman Tiffany Rizzo explained her vote, “I want to state that obviously nobody wants to pay more in taxes and I don’t want to see anybody lose their job [through cuts] so I’m willing to vote yes, but I want us to do everything and know that everybody’s worked so hard already, but I really want to try to get as close to that two percent as possible.”

Supervisor Dave Plavchak said that on October 2, the board received the tentative town budget for 2025.

“We were some $800,000 over the cap, if you remember the first presentation we all got,” he said. “In working so far with department heads, the bookkeeper and the budget managers we are right now at $236,770 over the cap, which would be a budget increase from year to year of 5.7 percent.” The Town Board cut approximately $500,000 from the tentative to the Preliminary Budget but this still left it at 2.9% over the cap.

The total amount of the Preliminary Budget is $15,113,999 and the amount to be raised by taxes is $9,539,821, which includes the fire districts. The Preliminary budget is 8.7 percent higher than the 2024 budget and the amount to be raised by taxes is 5.7% higher.

Plavchak said this would mean, “for instance if you had a house in town that was assessed at $300,000 your taxes, on average, would go up about $202 [from 2024] and of course there are differences from inside and outside the water district.” He noted that on a house assessed at $300,000, inside the water/sewer district the homeowner would see an increase of $193 for the year, inside just the water district the increase would be $198 and outside would be $202, “so a little deviation within the water district and that’s where we’re at right now, today.”

Plavchak said the Town Board still has a few weeks left to make any additional changes to the budget.

“We are working on stuff and don’t know where we’ll end up, but what I do know after talking to some of the other Supervisors around us and reading some of the articles of what they’re struggling with, Gardner is 13 percent over the cap, Plattekill is 17 percent over and Kingston is well over but that was driven mainly by the fact that they created their own ambulance service as they had problems with their service,” he said. Plavchak said Lloyd’s issue is that they are seeing rising costs in the ambulance service.

“Insurance is [also] a big driver in our overall budget, for example workers compensation is up by 12 percent, Social Security is up 11 percent, hospital medical insurance is up by 11 percent and liability up by almost 20 percent,” he said.

Plavchak said retirement costs have increased by 27 percent, “but there’s a piece of retirement that’s an exclusion towards the [tax] cap, but only the first 2% count against the cap. So that means if we met the 2% cap, our taxes would still go up by 4.3 percent because you have exclusions from the cap that you still have to collect revenues for.”

Plavchak’s secretary Margaret O’Halloran reported that the town recently received some unexpected revenue, with the Supervisor adding that this helped lower the initial overage of $800,000 down to the $236,770 figure. Even with that drop Plavchak said they are still over the two percent tax cap, but procedurally a local law is needed to exceed the tax cap. If the town is able to get under the tax cap then the law is simply rescinded and is not used. If the local law to exceed the cap was not approved for 2025, the town would have to operate on the same amount that is in the 2024 budget. If that happened, the Town Board would have to make some significant cuts to the 2025 budget. He said these cuts could be to services, personnel or activities, “to get back to that [2024] budget level.”

Plavchak concluded by saying, “We’re looking for ideas and if anybody has them, bring them forward...myself and others will continue to work on this to look for opportunities to decrease it.”

The Town Board is scheduled to vote on the final 2025 budget at their November 20th meeting at 7 p.m. at the town hall, 12 Church St., Highland.