Sea Cliff board adopts $5.32M budget
The $5.32 million budget adopted this week by the Sea Cliff board of trustees includes a property tax levy that squeaks below the Albany-mandated cap.
The 2012-13 budget, approved on Monday with a unanimous 5-0 vote, is 0.3 percent lower than the current fiscal year’s budget.
“We spent a lot of time on this,” Mayor Bruce Kennedy said Thursday. “We kept on going back to every department and reviewing them line by line by line. We squeezed everything out of a dollar we possibly could.”
The increase in the property tax levy, Kennedy said, is 1.69 percent — with the tax revenue budgeted at $4.74 million for the fiscal year beginning June 1.
The 2012-13 taxes are just $34,000 below what the state calculated as Sea Cliff’s levy limit, the mayor said.
The board of trustees on Monday also adopted a local law granting themselves the ability to override the cap in what Kennedy said was “playing on the safe side.”
The measure was approved to account for the rare case that unforeseen factors used in Albany’s calculation — such as an unexpected increase in pension costs — push Sea Cliff over the 2 percent levy limit, the mayor said.
A January public hearing on the tax cap override drew about 100 raucous residents to Sea Cliff Village Hall, and officials had deferred the vote.
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