PETERSHAM — Voters will face a 38-article warrant when they gather for Petersham’s Annual Town Meeting on Monday, June 6. However, it’s likely the five-article Special Town Meeting set to convene just prior to the annual conclave will generate much — if not most — of the evening’s discussion.
The Special Town Meeting, which begins at 7 p.m., is meant to close out some bills which will be left at the end of the current fiscal year. One of the articles, however, is to address an issue that just doesn’t seem to want to go away.
At a Special Town Meeting held in early December of last year, voters approved spending $721,000 to demolish the Nichewaug Inn and Academy complex in the center of town. At that time, it was determined the town should borrow $621,000, while using $100,000 from the town’s free cash account to cover the total cost.
At its meeting on Tuesday, May 31, the Selectboard voted to dedicate $100,000 in ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) money to the demolition. At the December town meeting, voters approved an amendment offered from the floor to take $100,000 from free cash instead of using COVID-19 relief monies for the project.
The reason the issue goes before town meeting attendees again is because the town’s bond advisors — or bond counsel — felt a couple of steps necessary to move forward with the loan had been missed.
“The bond counsel said there were two missed steps,” said board Chair Nancy Allen, “that could easily be corrected. We were happy to do one of them because it involved another board supporting this important project, and that was the Capital Improvement Planning Committee. We would have been happy to have them included in December, but it was just an oversight.
“So, this is the project that just won’t go away.”
Because of having to revote the loan, Allen explained, work on the demolition will likely get under way in June or July. Plans had called for the project to commence in April.
Article 5 on the Special Town Meeting warrant asks voters to use a variety of funding sources to cover a deficit of $437,533 in the budget of the Petersham Center Elementary School. Allen, speaking with the Athol Daily News, explained that a typo — or what Advisory Finance Committee Chair Rich Cavanaugh calls a ‘scrivener’s error’ — led to voters at last year’s Annual Town Meeting approving a PCS budget of $1.2 million, rather than the $1.6 million that had been included in the budget cobbled together by town officials.
“The school had put in for $1.6 million,” said Allen. “It had shown ‘as approved’ for $1.6 million — in other words, the Selectboard and the Finance Committee were all on the same page — it was typed up as $1.6 million. But when the motion was made from the floor, it was called out for $1.2 million, and nobody noticed. Nobody caught it.”
Allen said the discrepancy didn’t become known to town officials until April.
“We were working with Capital Improvement Planning Committee, when it was pointed out by (town Treasurer Dana Robinson) that ‘you guys have x-amount of excess levy capacity.” And we all asked, ‘Why is that?’”
Excess levy capacity is a potential municipal reserve that arises out of the operation of Proposition 2½. It is the difference between the maximum tax revenue a municipality is permitted to raise under Proposition 2½ and the tax revenue actually raised by the town.
“That’s when it finally started to unfold,” said Allen, “that we were short $400,000. And by then, we had been working on the budget for months and we had approved all the budgets for all three schools. So, we had taken care of all that moving forward, and then this realization happened.”
Allen said no changes were proposed in the school budgets, which will go before voters at the Annual Town Meeting. Instead, it was decided to address the deficit at a Special Town Meeting.
“Once you’re dealing with deficits within the current fiscal year — which, of course, that’s what the deficit is, it’s the year you’re in — you have to cover that deficit with available funds,” she explained. “You cannot go to the taxpayers for more taxes. You have to use what you have. You can’t go backward with taxation.
“We looked at all our available pots of money, if you will,” Allen continued, “and put together the funds together from available funds, which we’ll be proposing on Monday night to cover the $400,000 deficit.”
To erase the red ink, the Selectboard and Finance Committee are recommending the use of $87,569 in free cash, $78,923 from the Board of Assessors Excess Overlay account, a total of $2,200 from the revolving accounts of the Board of Health and Planning Board, and $268,841 from the town’s stabilization fund.
The Special Town Meeting also includes articles seeking nearly $38,000 to eliminate and FY22 deficit in the Highway Department’s snow and ice account, and just over $17,000 in the same department’s wages account.
Greg Vine can be reached at gvineadn@gmail.com