DUNMORE — Borough council introduced its 2020 budget tonight, which will keep taxes the same for the year with a small surplus in revenue.
Councilman Michael McHale presented the $12,790,917 budget, explaining that it’s at least the 10th straight year that the borough presented a balanced budget with no tax increases. Residents will continue to pay 44 mills in municipal property taxes. A mill is a $1 tax on every $1,000 of assessed property value.
“We scrutinize every single dollar that goes out of the borough’s taxpayer’s pockets,” McHale said.
McHale, who was not reelected to council earlier this month, said the borough is in “pretty good shape.”
“We have a lot of watching to do in the upcoming years, but the people here are definitely are capable of doing so,” he said.
The first draft of the budget projects an $18,757 surplus, with $2,995,712, or 23.4% of borough revenue, coming from Dunmore’s host agreement with the Keystone Sanitary Landfill.
However, last month landfill consultant Al Magnotta contended that Keystone could rescind millions of dollars in host fees if council did not override Mayor Timothy Burke’s veto of a landfill zoning amendment. The zoning amendment, which Burke vetoed in October, said sanitary landfills are not structures and therefore would not be subjected to the 50-foot height restriction in Keystone’s zoning district. Council did not override the veto.
Landfill opponents contend that the mayor’s veto does not violate the host agreements.
As part of the 2014 host agreement between the landfill and Dunmore, the borough will receive $1.52 per ton of waste brought into the landfill in 2020 rather than the state minimum of $0.41 per ton.
Council President Michael Dempsey said the borough has not heard from landfill attorneys about the host agreement, and council did not discuss the landfill’s contentions while creating the budget.
“It did not come up in the budget discussions,” he said. “None of that was discussed with the regular budget for this year.”
Before tonight’s meeting, McHale, who prepared the budget, said he would not be answering any questions.
During the meeting, the Dunmore School District awarded the borough with $100,000 in state funds for providing the district with a second school resource officer last year, Superintendent John Marichak said. The district applied for the grant through the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, and the funds are earmarked to be used for resource officers, he said.
The district already had a school resource officer in its junior/senior high school. But following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, last year that left 17 dead, the district asked the borough to add a resource officer to its elementary school, Marichak said.
The borough agreed and foots the bill for both resource officers, he said. Resources officers’ salaries were not available today.
“It’s the best thing that could’ve happened to our students,” Marichak said before the meeting. “We’re giving it to the borough because of what they’ve done for us.”
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