FORT FAIRFIELD, Maine — The town of Fort Fairfield has set its property tax rate for the next year, lowering it by one mill to $24.70 per $1,000 of property value.
“I’d like to make a comment to compliment the staff and the department heads on being frugal and their efforts to find funding,” Town Council Chairman Jason Barnes said on Wednesday, Sept. 19, when councilors adopted the mill rate. “It all adds up and helps.”
When Fort Fairfield set its budget this past summer, town manager Jim Risner said he was pretty confident that the tax rate could be lowered. Last year, the town’s property taxes increased by almost five percent due to an increase in the school district’s budget, following two years of a flat tax rate.
This year, Fort Fairfield’s Maine School Administrative District 20 had a $2 million budget that came in 6.2 percent lower than last year.
The town also saw a $124,000 surplus from last year’s budget, Risner said.
During the meeting, councillor Mitch Butler asked if the town should consider keeping the same mill rate and investing the additional funds in two areas of need: sidewalk repairs in downtown Fort Fairfield and a generator for the town office, which has been hit with recent power outages.
“If we had left the mill rate the same, would we be able to use that for sidewalks and maybe for a generator for the building?” he asked.
Risner said the town is looking to address both those issues. Town officials are talking with representatives of the Maine Department of Transportation about sidewalk repairs, and considering a program that would have the community cover 20 percent of the costs.
The town also is planning to issue a request for proposals to purchase a generator system for backup power at the municipal building.
Risner also noted that he and the town staff have worked hard to increase the capital reserves over the past several years. The town’s capital reserves stand at approximately $636,000, an increase of 67 percent from 2015, when Risner took over as town manager. (Risner is stepping down as town manager when the town finds a replacement.)
In other Fort Fairfield news, town code enforcement officer Anthony Levesque said the municipality has made progress with the tenants of a property that was the subject of a land use complaint related to excessive trash and noise issues.
After the town brought the tenants to court and issued a clean up order with a potential fine, the tenants cleaned up a large portion of the property. However, the town may still have to remove some items and bill the tenants for that work, and will conduct a final inspection to check for safety concerns, Levesque said.
“I consider it about 99 percent cleaned up,” he said. “Compared to what it was, it’s unrecognizable.”
