The Fredonia Board of Trustees have narrowly passed a 2025-26 village budget with a 65% property tax increase.

Trustees voted Monday to approve the budget. The tally was 3-2. Trustees Ben Brauchler, Jon Espersen and Nicole Siracuse provided the “aye” votes, while Trustees Michelle Twichell and Paul Wandel voted against the budget.

The budget moves Fredonia’s property rate to $61.09 per $1,000 assessed value, from the current $36.95. Village officials say it will raise taxes by an average of $540 per house.

Wandel wanted to table the budget for further discussion, but only Twichell supported that. The trustees had a workshop before beginning their regular meeting, and Espersen and Siracuse told Wandel he should have brought up his concerns during the workshop.

Twichell accused Espersen of denying another budget meeting last week and complained he still won’t meet with her on the spending plan. Espersen said she requested a meeting on short notice at the same time he was taking his wife to a doctor’s appointment, and sarcastically asked if he should clear his wife’s appointments with Twichell.

Espersen warned that the village must pass a budget by May 1. “I’m going to say aye because of the impact if we don’t pass this in the next couple days,” he said. “We had four weeks, we had four meetings to get this budget together.”

Twichell indicated earlier that one of the reasons for her “no” vote was a $20 fee enacted for users of the summer children’s recreation program.

The trustees also blew up their previously enacted guideline that the village must keep a reserve equal to between 10% and 25% of the budget. The resolution to freeze the guideline promised an annual review of it. That measure passed unanimously.

Village officials really didn’t say all that much about the budget Monday — but a few residents had plenty of chatter, and it wasn’t exactly positive.

Most notably, former village administrator Richard St. George had some caustic comments. St. George resigned as administrator in 2018 and the village government subsequently abolished the position.

He noted that Fredonia went from a fund balance of $766,000 in the 2024-25 budget to negative $307,000 (using numbers rounded to the nearest thousand).

“That’s a burn of $1,072,000 during the year. Does that sound right to anybody? You got an $8 million budget and you blew through almost $1.1 million,” St. George said. He wondered where the deficit is itemized, “because when I go through the numbers on this budget I don’t come anywhere near that.”

Noting the $540 average tax increase quoted by officials, he said it would be a lot more for some. St. George also chided village officials for cutting the administrator position, stating that if there still was one, they “would have found out a hell of a lot sooner” about financial problems.

Bill Burns said, “There really is no justifiable legal or moral imperative to keep positions filled when there’s no money to keep them filled. To me, to do otherwise is a failed socialist experiment.”

Burns predicted a “trickle out” of residents over the tax hike. He called trustees’ attempts to make small cuts, such as to their own stipends, “silly and trivial” and concluded “the whole thing is just nonsense.”

Sam Drayo said the tax raise will be a “definite hardship to many village residents and it will have an adverse impact on the marketability of Fredonia real estate.”