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Title: |
For town, the budget picture improves |
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Author: |
Katie Klingsporn |
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Date: |
04/25/2010 |
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For town, the budget picture improves
With increasing revenues,
town adds to budget
By Katie Klingsporn
Associate Editor
Published: Sunday, April 25, 2010 8:09 AM CDT
A year ago, the town of Telluride was in the thick of cutting its budget — whittling services, laying off employees and slashing projects in a scramble to patch major holes left by plummeting revenues.
But somewhere near the end of last summer, the economic downturn began a slow climb from the bottom that has helped pad the town’s coffers.
And with a rosier picture, the Telluride Town Council has decided to reinstate some of the items it cut from the budget over the past year, as well as replenish some of its reserves. The town gave the OK to do so at a special work session held this week with former Town Manager Frank Bell (who steered town through the recession).
These are mostly small expenditures — grants, money for flower boxes, money for the parks and rec projects, for example — and the town still plans to move conservatively into the future.
While the town can stop the drastic cutting and start to reinstate small things, it’s by no means time for a spending spree, Bell said.
“I think the take-home message is our budget is stabilized. I don’t think it means the council needs to rescind the recession plan,” he said.
The council plans to add the following expenditures to its 2010 budget:
• A $5,000 contribution to the July 4 celebration
• $2,500 for the main street flower baskets
• $10,000 to help operate the annual hazardous materials day
• $15,000 for The New Community Coalition
• $10,000 for Telluride TV
In addition, the town agreed to inject $175,000 for capital projects and $75,000 for parks and recs projects into the budget. Both departments saw big cuts in the last year. And, the council agreed to create a bonus pool for employees — if revenues continue to improve through the first half of the year — to help overcome the last two years of compensation freezes.
The town is able to free up this money mostly due to real estate transfer tax revenues, which have staged a comeback that has exceeded the town’s expectations.
RETT has been on the mend since October, showing year-over improvements for six months straight. While these revenues are still not in the neighborhood of banner years like 2007, they still mark a huge improvement from last year. March’s collection of $451,545, for example, was a whopping 662 percent improvement over March of 2009, which saw $59,253 trickle in.
The town has already collected $1.16 million in RETT in 2010 — only $340,000 short of its projected collections for the entire year. In 2009, the town collected a total of $1.5 million in RETT.
Sales tax revenues, meanwhile, were relatively stable over the winter — and are up about 3.5 percent for the year — which also helped the situation.
Bell warned the council that just because things are on the up, it’s no reason to think the town is home safe.
RETT, he said, “has been like a narcotic. And like a narcotic, just because we have it again doesn’t mean we need to inject it.”
Bell said it’ll be “a long long time, if ever” until Telluride gets back to those boom years.
Council member Bob Saunders said that the situation has been difficult, but the town has learned some good fiscal habits from it.
“If there can be a silver lining to the recession plan, it’s that we have cut back a lot of spending in town,” he said
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