Mayor Peter Marchetti’s plan – a roughly 3% increase over the current year – includes a $140 million municipal operating budget and $86.5 million school budget.
He told the city council at its committee of the whole meeting Wednesday night that rising fixed costs are behind increased spending.
“Knowing that the range of insurance rates increases could be anywhere from nine to 20% across the commonwealth, we later learned that ours was a 10.9% increase, but after doing a really deeper dive and analyzing who is in what insurance plan, that increase is really only an 8.2% increase at a little over $2.5 million," explained the mayor. "Our retirement contribution is up 5.2%, with a total of $904,778, and debt service increase is $557,529 or 8% increase.”
After weeks of deliberation to come, the city council will take final votes on the budget during its proper meetings in June.
The new fiscal year starts July 1st.
