By STEVEN JUPITER
BRANDON—The Brandon Selectboard and the Brandon Budget Committee convened on Monday night to make the final decisions regarding the budget that will be proposed to Brandon voters in March.
The Board approved a provisional budget for Fiscal Year 2025-2026 of $3,403,965, which represents a 2.25% increase over the current year’s budget of $3,328,882. The amount to be raised by taxes in FY26 would be $2,876,645, which represents an increase of 2.58% over the current year.
The Board also approved an appropriation request of $50,000 to establish a capital fund that the town would draw from for expenses such as equipment or infrastructure. If voters pass the appropriation in March, the total amount to be raised by taxes for FY26 will be $2,926,645. This represents an increase of 1.29% over the total amount that was raised by taxes for the current year when the $85,000 appropriation that voters approved for paving last March is taken into account.
Brandon Town Manager Seth Hopkins emphasized that these figures are “provisional” and might change if new information comes to light or if circumstances change between now and when the proposed budget has to be officially warned for Town Meeting in March.
The vote on this proposed budget was not unanimous. The Board voted 4 to 1, with Board member Brian Coolidge voting nay. Mr. Coolidge expressed discontent with the $50,000 appropriation and with the sub-budget that the Board had approved for the Brandon Police Department earlier in the meeting.
Appropriations, which are stand-alone requests for funding that appear as separate questions on the ballot, have been controversial among the members of the Selectboard for years. Some members have called them “smoke & mirrors” because they believe that these requests mask the actual amount that taxpayers will end up paying. Other members have argued that appropriations give voters more control over spending by allowing them to approve a basic budget while accepting or rejecting additional funding requests for specific purposes.
For example, if Brandon voters approve the core FY26 budget while rejecting the $50,000 appropriation for a capital fund, the core budget will remain unaffected by the rejection. But if the $50,000 were included in the core budget itself, voters who object to it would have to vote down the entire budget even if the $50K were their only objection. As it stands, voters will be able to decide as a separate question whether to approve the $50K. If they vote yes, that $50K then becomes a tax liability for Brandon residents on top of the core budget.
Monday’s meeting capped off a process that began in September, when the Board and the civilian Budget Committee (who act in an advisory capacity only) began discussing priorities for the FY26 budget. The groups met with the heads of town departments, who explained their departmental needs. The groups then evaluated the departmental budgets one by one.
The Board and Committee spent the most time discussing the budget for the Brandon Police Department (BPD). The proposal that was approved on Monday set that budget at $937,000 for FY26, up $81,000 from the $856,400 that was allocated for the current year. This represents an increase of 9.46% in the police budget and would increase the tax liability on a $186K house by $38 per year.
This $937K budget will allow to maintain the Police Chief, 5 full-time officers, and 1 part-time officer. BPD currently has 6 full-time officers in addition to the Chief, but one officer is scheduled to leave the department in January. In the proposed budget, that officer will not be replaced. The Board voted 3 to 2 for the $937K police budget, with Mr. Coolidge and Board member Tim Guiles both voting against it.
The proposed budget will not allow BPD to provide 24/7 on-duty coverage. Instead, there will be periods when officers will be “on call,” which means that they have returned home and can be summoned back to Brandon if calls for service come in.
Town Manager Seth Hopkins has estimated that the cost of 24/7 on-duty coverage, which would require having two officers in uniform and in Brandon at all times, would be around $1.2 million.
No one on the Selectboard appeared willing to propose that figure to taxpayers. The spectre of last spring’s budget failures still haunted the room, causing the Board to hesitate to propose increases. Mr. Hopkins had devised another BPD budget scheme for the Selectboard to consider that would have cost $950K but did not find enough support among the Board.
Another scheme would have lowered the BPD budget to $750K but did not find adequate support on the Board or among the Committee, though both Mr. Coolidge and Mr. Guiles advocated its adoption in order to keep the budget “sustainable.” However, the $750K scheme would have required the layoff of an officer (in addition to the loss of the officer scheduled for January), leaving BPD with only 4 full-time officers plus the Chief.
Mr. Guiles held that the reduction in police staff would bring Brandon in line with other communities of similar size in Vermont.
However, several members of the Budget Committee and several other attendees objected to any reduction in police staffing. Committee member Karen Rhodes repeated a question she had asked at prior meetings, “What price tag do you put on safety?” Committee member Gabe McGuigan said that there was certainly room “to do better than $750,000.” He added that the town needed to provide the maximum services it could convince voters to pass.
Brandon Fire Department (BFD) Chief Tom Kilpeck cautioned the Board that a reduction in resources would hamper BPD’s ability to carry out its essential functions. He noted that the Board had approved a Veterans Day Parade but had not taken into account that BPD wasn’t adequately staffed to handle the accompanying traffic changes. Instead, BFD had had to step in to assist BPD with managing traffic.
He also cautioned that a reduction in resources might cause other officers to leave the department.
Board member Heather Nelson said that the jump to 24/7 coverage might be too much for the budget to absorb in a single year but that the Board should work toward that goal.
Committee member Barry Varian expressed approval of the budget overall but questioned whether community members would be satisfied with the level of police service, noting that it could take up to 45 minutes for police to respond during on-call hours.
Ultimately, the Board agreed to increase the police budget sufficiently to maintain its current staffing (minus the officer leaving in January) but not to increase it enough to provide 24/7 on-duty coverage.
The next Selectboard meeting will be on Monday, December 30 at 6:30 p.m. in order to accommodate the holidays.
