The Concord City Council on Monday gave their final, unanimous approval to next year’s $61.81 million spending plan.
“It’s pretty much what the manager had proposed to us in May,” Concord Mayor Jim Bouley said.
Councilors last tweaked the budget earlier in June, when, on Bouley’s recommendation, they added $39,000 for weekend sidewalk plowing, $29,330 for a community service aide at the police department and downsized an $810,000 irrigation project at the Beaver Meadow Golf course to a $145,000 pump house.
The budget is projected to result in a 3.4 percent increase on the tax rate. The estimated tax impact is an additional 33 cents per $1,000 of assessed property value, or an increase of about $83 for the owner of a $250,000 home. Overall, the budget represents a 2 percent increase in spending over the prior year’s $60.58 million budget.
When city officials started their budget process this year, they had several bumps in spending that alone would have resulted in an estimated tax rate increase of more than 6 percent. Those bumps included $810,000 in additional debt service on past projects; $496,000 in new retirement costs downshifted from the state; $481,500 in employee pay; $403,300 in other employee benefits, including those owed to retirees; and a $195,500 boost to the neighborhood paving program.
The city whittled the tax rate increase down with new revenues – like $114,000 in motor vehicle registration fees and a $113,800 increase in new investment income – in addition to $400,000 from an insurance reserve fund, and $164,000 in anticipated utility cost savings.
Councilors also unanimously greenlit a new tax exemption for solar installations on residential, commercial and industrial properties. The new exemption will allow property owners to take 100 percent of the value of the solar installation off their property assessment. It won’t apply to properties that generate the electricity for resale.
“It’s an incentive for both commercial users and residents to place solar on their facilities. We didn’t want to have any impediments for folks doing that,” said Rob Werner, the state director for the New Hampshire League of Conservation Voters and a city councilor for Ward 5.
Some companies had already backed off from installing solar panels because the exemption wasn’t available, he said.
More than 120 municipalities in the state have a similar exemption, according to the New Hampshire office of energy and planning.
“Putting solar on both residential and commercial is environmentally responsible, but it also has an economic impact for both the residential user and the commercial user, and we really want to be a welcoming place for the development of renewable energy,” Werner said.
Councilors also unanimously renewed City Manager Tom Aspell’s contract for another year. Aspell, who has been manager since 2005, will get a 3 percent salary bump in his new contract, and the city’s contributions to his retirement plan will go up to 9.5 percent. As the highest-paid employee in the city, he made $185,486 in 2016.
By charter, the city council is supposed to evaluate the manager’s performance as either “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory.”
“What you heard tonight is the council, overwhelmingly, unanimously, voted satisfactory. But, given another choice, we would have given the manager an either ‘outstanding’ or ‘excellent,’ ” Bouley said.
(Lola Duffort can be reached at 369-3321 or lduffort@cmonitor.com.)