Former Fredonia Mayor Frank Pagano returned to Village Hall Monday to criticize the Board of Trustees over its financial practices.

The rhetoric about Fredonia’s challenging financial situation Monday flowed like Canadaway Creek after a heavy rain.

Former Mayor Frank Pagano made a rare Village Hall appearance to slam the Board of Trustees over its 2025-26 budget with an approximately 62% tax hike. Former Village Administrator Richard St. George and a few others did the same. Trustees later responded to the accusations and judgments offered by the speakers from the public.

Pagano said his decision to speak was spurred by an 84-year-old resident of Liberty Street who tearfully wondered to him how she could afford the tax hike.

“You know, I didn’t have an answer for her. I told her to call you folks because you’re the ones that raised the taxes,” he said.

“Let me tell you what the results of your tax raise are going to be,” Pagano continued. “Number one, your bond rating is going to hell. You’re going to pay more money to borrow money because you haven’t managed your finances. Number two, you have a budget of $12.5 million, you have $14.8 million in debt … if you think the taxes went up a lot this year, wait til next year. You’re not going to be able to sustain this kind of spending. You need to get your spending in control. In order for your budget to work next year, you need to cut a million dollars from your budget.”

Pagano offered assistance with the budget.”I’ve got half a dozen people, smart, qualified, educated people, who are willing to work with you in this budget and trim a million dollars off it.

I think you should take my suggestion and work to get this budget reduced.”

St. George wanted to know, “Do you have a report that you can present to the residents that’s going to explain to them in simple terms where the money went?”

As he did at the previous trustees meeting, St. George noted the village has lost nearly $1.1 million from its fund balance over the past year. “You guys sit there and shake your heads but you need to follow the money. It’s important to present to the people, ‘This is where the money went.'”

St George alleged that the fire department “broke the village” by making too many equipment purchases in a short period of time. “The board needs to do some due diligence. They can’t just say ‘Yes, let’s write a check and just do it.'”

Fredonia’s elected officials later responded to the public rancor.

Trustee Ben Brauchler noted that the latest budget cut about $300,000 in fire department ambulance revenue. “It was an imaginary number last year and it’s an imaginary number this year,” he said of the revenue line. “I think this year we’re coming in below the real number, and last year we (budgeted) way above it.”

Trustee Nicole Siracuse offered some detailed comments. “As far as laying off people being a solution to fix all of our budget issues because our budget has created economic issues for our residents — isn’t that creating an economic hardship for the family (of laid off workers), while also creating a hardship within that department, asking those that are left to do more with less?” she wondered.

Former Trustee James Lynden, whose criticism of the board is a regular occurrence, had earlier stated that taxes never went up during his tenure. “Coming here and saying you didn’t raise taxes through your entire tenure isn’t something to brag about because every year your expenses went up,” Siracuse retorted.

“It does look like this all happened with a flip of the switch. It didn’t,” she continued, stating that Treasure Erlyssa LeBeau provided village officials with documents when they sought a Revenue Anticipation Note “to show this has been a long time coming.”

Siracuse said “the fund balance was pulled from for too long to balance the budget and then to also cover cash shortfalls, I think over the last five years is what she provided us data for. Finally, this year, we just ran out, thus needing the loan that we needed. We now need to cover replenishing the fund balance, we need to cover that loan, and also our rising costs. That’s where we ended up with this year. It didn’t happen overnight. It was coming for at least the past five years, if not 10.”

Trustee Michelle Twichell tends to lay heavy blame on the fire department for Fredonia’s financial situation and did so again Monday.

“They did initially say two years ago they were going to bring in $800,000 (in ambulance revenue) — they brought in maybe half that,” Twichell said. She suggested that the village go to arbitration if the fire department attempted to cite contractual obligations in seeking to fill open positions.

“It hasn’t really been looked at to cover the cost of everything they want to do,” Twichell continued.

She asked LeBeau to publicly release the cost analysis Siracuse mentioned. “I believe we’re going to have to change, we’re going to have to lay off people. We really have to pay more attention to what we’re spending. They’ve got to hear the word ‘no.’ A lot of times, we don’t say that, and that’s got to be part of our new vocabulary.”

Trustee Paul Wandel echoed Twichell’s comments and added. “We’re going to actively listen. I’m going to say publicly I like the term ‘lessons learned,’ what can we learn. Let’s not repeat errors — whatever the situation was or is, we can always improve.”

Mayor Michael Ferguson said a recent report by state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli stated that many other communities in the state are going through the same financial challenges.

“It’s sad, having grown up in New York state, to see what is going on right now in many, many different communities,” he said.