Hard Times Hit Home In Fairfax

Hard times hit home in Fairfax
Voters hear how capital projects are postponed

TOWN MEETING = 2009
By Sam Hemingway
Free Press Staff Writer

This article appeared in Sunday, March1, 2009 Burlington Free Press, however, was not on their website on line. In my previous checks with their correspondents, they don't mind my posting, unless it is on their web site. If it is they prefer I link to it.

FAIRFAX — Voters found out Saturday just how much the nation's deepening economic recession has trickled down into their proposed town and school budgets for 2009-10.

"There will be no black-topping of town roads in Fairfax this year," Select-board member William Ormerod told 120 residents at Fairfax's annual town meeting.

"There's a whole host of capital projects we would have loved to get on the list this year," Ormerod told the voters meeting inside the elementary school gymnasium at Bellows Free Academy. "But this is not best year to do that."

He said that, as part of the effort to cut spending, the town's library and recreation department gave up money they had kept in reserve to attract grants to the town.

"I wouldn't call them rainy day funds but, man, it was pouring this year," Ormerod said in thanking the two entities for their help.

The town's school department was pinching its pennies, too.

School Board Chairwoman Margaret Stewart told voters there will be no repainting of a section of the academy as had been scheduled.

She also said the board will forego receiving stipends for its labors in the coming year and will freeze the salary of the yet-to-be-hired new high school principal. The board also nixed expanding the school's kindergarten program to full-time status, even though the additional cost would only have been $40,000.

"I feel a lot of people, wanted it," Kimberly Johnson-Lesny, 36, said in an interview. The mother of three young children served on the panel. "They should have come to the town and them decide this."

Stewart said she didn't want to make the cut, but said she couldn't ignore the ongoing economic crisis, or this winter's call by Gov. Jim Douglas for schools to try to level-fund their budgets this year.

About the only thing voters got to cheer about was a moment in Stewart's speech when she congratulated the fact that the high school boy's basketball team had a chance Saturday night to bring home its fist Division III championship since 1966.

"We have needy people here," Stewart said somberly during a break in the proceedings. "We may not be hurting as bad as other places, but we've had staff here whose husbands or significant others have lost their jobs."

The result? When Fairfax voters go to the polls Tuesday, they will be deciding whether to approve a $1,730,456 budget that is 4.9 percent less than what they passed last year. The $11,327,949 school budget
will be up, but barely, just 1.5 percent higher the current spending plan.

Saturday's meeting, along with those in a handful of other Vermont towns, marked the start of Town Meeting Day 2009 in the state. Most towns will have their meetings Monday night or Tuesday. The Fairfax meeting was spiced with all the trappings of the Town Meeting Day tradition: sandwiches, sweets and drinks for sale outside the gymnasium, and an orderly discussion of the issues inside between voters seated in folding chairs and their elected leaders.

"This is the first time I've come," said Tom Fontaine, a building contractor who said he had the time to attend Town Meeting Day this year because he hasn't been quite as busy with work this winter as usual.
Fontaine, the father of a 4-year-old, said he was disappointed the school board had not stood behind the plan to expand the kindergarten.

"When it comes to education, I hate to think it's about the money," he said.

At one point, Fairfax resident Barbara Murphy went to the microphone to ask town officials if what she was reading in the Delinquent Tax Collector's Statement on Page 19 of the town's annual report was
true.

The statement said the amount of overdue taxes in town had jumped from zero two years ago to $24,406 last year to $191,375 in the current year.

I have changed the name in the following to Johanna Blake, who answered the question instead of Judy Cleary as was written in the original article.

Johanna Blake, Fairfax Town Tax Collector, answered that while the overdue tax number had dropped $30,000 since the report was printed, it was still unusually high.

"It's a difficult time out there," Cleary said.

The article has appeared on The Burlington Free Press Web Site on Monday, March 2, 2009

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20090302/NEWS0301/90302019