BudgetPoliceTool.mp4

Kevin Carriere: Today, I'm going to talk about taxes.

Town Councilman David Punchak: Okay, we're going to pay from reserves for this year and recommend the next council pay from, is it smoking mirrors? Are we just kicking the can down the road?

Kevin Carriere: So hold up, what are we talking about? So when we voted on the police station bond, we voted for a $9 million bond to pay for this construction. And obviously we have to pay interest every year on the bond. And for the first two years, what we're doing is we're taking money that was previously kind of set aside for the police stations and using that from our general fund, which is about $1.6 million total, about $800,000 per year. It's exactly what Councilman Punchak is worried about when he says, “kicking the can down the road.” See, the problem is, are we prepared in year three to pay a new $770,000 interest payment?

Town Administrator Scott Gibbs: This is going to kick in and understanding where we need to get the budget at so that when that happens, it doesn't hit the taxpayers.

Kevin Carriere: To figure out what that might look like and if we're ready to pay, you can say, well, how much tax revenue does the town take in? Now, that does include your property taxes, but it also includes commercial taxes.

If we look at that, over the last four years, on average, we increase the amount of tax revenue that we take in by about $800,000 a year. But remember, in year three, we're gonna need to find $770,000 in additional tax revenue for the bond payment.

And so what I've built is this tool. And what the tool does is allows you to kind of estimate for the next two years, how much percent in total tax revenue does a town need to increase by? So by 2029, we can pay for that year's bond payment. It's not a pleasant sight when you look at it. The tool also shows you for every $100 that you pay in taxes, where does that money go?

What we see is that even though, yes, spending overall the amount of money, like number has increased for everything. The percent of the budget that goes towards schools has gone down in the last couple of years, while the percent that we're spending on our police has gone up.

One of the main reasons why we moved back was that our North Smithfield school system always ranks in the top of the state. And so our budget can tell us a lot about where our values were, where they are now, and where they're headed.

You should be able to easily understand what's happening with our money and where it's going and what we're thinking about in the long term. Be that having a clear plan of where we see our finances, having some goals set for the town, tracking how we have done on that comprehensive plan in the past. And that's why I’m running for North Smithfield Town Council.