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Dayton deficit explained at town board meeting

The town of Dayton made some changes at the October town board meeting to help the budget along for 2019. The biggest of these being a local law to increase the tax cap in hopes of getting things in the area back on track.

“The tax cap for 2019 is $312,640,” Town Bookkeeper Laura Napoli of Bahgat & Laurito-Bahgat stated. “When we prepared the budget, when we looked at the expenditures that we needed to make, and realistically looked at the revenues we were going to receive, we actually need to raise more taxes than $312,640. Based on the tentative budget that we looked at, we need $336,609, putting us over by $23,969.”

The rates are going to be 26 cents additionally per $1,000 for town residents and 94 cents for village residents. “In the highway town wide and the general town wide there are deficit fund balances,” Napoli said. “So as part of this budget we have discussed a repayment plan.”

She went on to explain that there are four separate funds in Dayton, the town wide, the highway town wide, the village wide and the highway village wide. Two years ago a truck was purchased with what was thought to be positive funds and in actuality there was a surplus, but not enough for the total cost. This is where the $100,000 deficit came from. Though this negative balance is there, it’s better for the tax payers that it worked out this way, rather than borrowing the money from a bank, which would accrue interest.

“We borrowed money basically from ourselves, the plan that we’ve got in this budget is a five-year period of payback to ourselves,” Napoli explained. “It (the budget) has been out of whack for a number of years, so now we’re going to work on getting it back to where all the funds have positive balances. We may do this again, but we’re going to do it in such a way that everyone is aware and that there’s a plan before the purchase is made; instead of finding out later and not being sure exactly what happened.”

The next Dayton Town Board meeting will be held Wednesday at 7 p.m.

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