By Brandon T. Bisceglia
Thanks to a sizeable increase in the town’s Grand List, Orange voters will be asked to approve a reduction by half a mill in their tax rate when they go to the polls this spring.
The proposed budget for $78,367,690, which was approved by the Board of Finance at a special meeting on March 28, will increase total expenditures by 2.96 percent. However, an increase in the Grand List by 5.44 percent to $2,249,438,880 has more than offset those increases.
As a result, the mill rate will drop from 33.25 to 32.75.
“It is one of the rarest things on this Earth that we have gotten a 5 percent Grand List increase,” said BOF Vice Chairman Jim Leahy during a March 7 discussion of the budget. “No one, in my judgment, should think we’re doing a good job if somehow we have a flat mill rate. That’s crazy.”
Whether the Grand List continues to grow at the pace it did this year is an open question. One dark cloud on the horizon is the pending departure of the Southern New England Gas Company, one of the town’s largest taxpayers.
The Orange budget is divided into three segments: the town, the Orange Board of Education, and the Amity District No. 5 Board of Education. The Amity portion involves a separate budget because it is shared with Bethany and Woodbridge and determined in part by the proportion of students from each town attending the school. Orange has the highest number of students in the district.
All portions of the budget would see increases, though not necessarily in line with what the various departments requested. The town side of the budget would go up by $341,826, or 1.35 percent.
One sticking point with the BOF, as it has been in previous years, was the proposed increase to the Amity budget. The Amity Finance Committee had proposed Orange pay an additional $1,339,066 in 2022-2023 – a 5.31 percent increase. But BOF members scoffed at that ask, noting that the district has ended every year in the last four years with a substantial surplus around $3 million, yet continually comes back to the towns for more.
“You were overtaxed $171 every single time this happened,” Leahy said.
The BOF decided this year to call the district’s bluff, unanimously approving only a 0.41 percent increase overall, with Orange paying $406,839 of that for a 1.61 percent increase in its contribution.
One of the more interesting items recently approved by the BOF was a capital outlay of $25,000 to install a tower clock at Town Hall in honor of the town’s bicentennial. The members approved the expenditure after the Board of Selectmen voted to approve installing the clock. The clock is scheduled to be put up in time for the Orange Country Fair in September.
The Amity budget will go to a town-wide referendum on May 3. The vote for the rest of the budget is scheduled for May 18.