Poland struggles to balance budget needs

POLAND — The town’s draft budget is ready for scrutiny.

“Our budget process started with me and the department heads putting together what we believe is the best draft budget from what we see and what we can cut,” said Town Manager Dana Lee. “The draft budget went to our budget committee and to selectmen at their meeting to save $5.00 to ship each package. Selectmen will review the draft and mark it up and then on February 9 we will begin deliberations with the budget committee and selectmen.”

The initial draft budget calls for approximately $41,000 in new taxes – an increase of approximately six dollars on a $100,000 home, he added.

“That increase is pretty mild,” Lee continued, “The state’s LD 1 formula allowed us to ‘grow spending’ by more than $100,000, but we came in at $41,000. I suspect that the budget committee and selectmen will try to get that down to zero.”

Lee said over the last two years, Poland has not spent additional money and continued to cut funds out of the budgets.

“We cut lots of money and I told them [selectmen] at the end of December, before we began to put together this budget, what we have now is not sustainable,” Lee said. “We have been through a bad economy and we temporarily hacked and slashed and tried to stay lean and mean. The funny thing is in bad economies people tend to lean on government even more. So we'll see where this ends.”