The Town, like any government, provides services to its residents as required by law, and discretionary spending. The services provided by the Town include:
General Government - 13% of expenses: Office salaries, Auditors, Legal, Board expenses, Election costs, Town Hall utilities & Maintenance, etc. There is very little opportunity to reduce this cost without reducing payroll, legal costs or deferring Town Hall maintenance.
Public Safety - 19 % of expenses: Public Safety is our Fire and Sheriff Department Contract providing these services to the Town. We can reduce our Sheriff Department costs by cancelling our contract with Dane County. This would save $225,000. At this time, the Board has decided that this is a needed and prudent expense to provide for the safety of our Town residents and their property. If you do not agree, let me know.
Public Works - 14% of expenses: General Engineering required by the Town for miscellaneous tasks, attendance at Board meetings, mapping, ATC issues, ordinance updates. Garbage and Recycle pick-up, brush chipping yard waste program. The Board is prudent in our assignments to the Town Engineering consultant to control engineering expenses. Garbage/Recycling costs are under a long term negotiated contract that is very favorable to the Town. We could reduce the brush chipping and yard waste programs and then the responsibility for yard waste would be on the individual homeowner. Please advise me if you want to eliminate yard waste pick-up services.
Roads - 25% of expenses: The Road budget includes town road crew salaries, three full time employees, crew and garage expenses and equipment, road maintenance materials, road improvement costs, road salting and snow plowing. I believe that the town and its residents are well-served by having safe and well maintained town roads. I am not in favor of sub-par roads and poor maintenance as this only increase future costs. It is a public safety issue and I give this top priority in my budgeting decision analysis.
Conservation and Developmant - 1% of expenses: Town Plan commission and engineering. Costs for land development planning insures town development meet town ordinances. There is little opportunity to reduce these costs
Recreation - 8% of expenses: Upkeep of town parks, Conservancies and trails. Includes playground chips, tree planting, baseball & soccer fields and basketball court maintenance, signage, park rangers, mowing and vegetation management. We could reduce our Recreation budget at the cost of neglecting our excellent park, trail and conservancy system. I am currently not in favor of reducing our Recreation expenses as our public land is valued by town residents as a quality of life issue.
Town Debt- 20% of expenses: Please refer to the Town Debt section in this blog for a detailed description of our town debt.
As you can see from the above discussion, the Town provides many services to its residents. We feel that we are responding to our residents concerns with high quality services at a reasonable cost. Any discretionary spending cuts will result in quality and safety issues for the Town. Anyone promising to reduce town spending is also promising to reduce town services endangering your safety and reducing your quality of life. Is that a price you are willing to pay?
