April 5 - Town of Falmouth

The Chairman of the Finance Committee mentioned our
detailed analysis that went back to every single one of these independent
items, and I do want to thank the Finance Committee for their work. They
were very strong participants in mapping out a strategy.
Maybe let’s go to the next chart. I don’t want to spend too
much time on this, but it does show you some of the work that we’ve done
in adapting to these changing economic trends in the 2009 collections for
what really amounts to be 85 or so percent of these local receipts. You
see the collections: 17 million in 2009, and we had originally had 19 million
for 2010 and we make adjustments, you know, down to the 18.5 range. In
the 2011 budget, it’s the same that what we’re trying to do by making these
estimates down to 17,480,000, it’s much closer to that ‘09 level, and we do
have documented increases.
So what we feel, moving forward, in this budget for 2011,
these are stable revenues. We’re not out of the woods yet in 2010. You
know, we still have a lot that’s up in the air, but we feel moving forward that
we’ve taken strong, decisive action to try to lower the estimates that we
have, to try to deal with these issues.
Now, another one of the key success factors that was
identified by the Alliance is the need to reassess community priorities and
to have a public process to do that. To this end, this year we are in the
midst of a massive effort to both limit expenses and prioritize Town
Tinkham Reporting
(508) 759-9162
1-
90