WESTHAMPTON — The town is facing a 5% to 10% budget deficit next year, due to a mix of factors including health insurance increases, inflation and an unstable income source.
At the Select Board’s Jan. 12 meeting, Finance Committee Chair Tad Weiss updated members on the upcoming budget process for fiscal year 2027, which begins July 1. He said it is early in the budgeting season for every town and there are not specific numbers yet, but it is going to be a challenging season.
“We made some progress,” Weiss said about first drafts of the budget. “We need to go a little deeper.”
Weiss said this budget season started earlier than any other in Westhampton history that he knows of. In an interview with the Gazette, Weiss said he first started crunching numbers in last September.
Weiss said the town has requested preliminary budget inputs from all departments by Thursday, Jan. 15, asking department heads to make 12.5% cuts to their budgets without touching fixed costs such as obligated debt service and health insurance increases. In other words, Weiss said the 12.5% reductions roughly equates to $750,000.
Weiss said it’s too early to say what next year’s budget will end up being. The current fiscal 2026 budget is approximately $7.6 million.
“We wanted them [departments] to take ownership of the category and if they wanted to dig really deep into expenses and avoid personnel cuts, that was their choice,” Weiss explained. “If they wanted to do a mix, that’s their choice.”
Of the departments that have returned draft budgets, Weiss said most made reductions to future expenses, steering away from personnel cuts. He said some have not reached the full 12.5% reduction.
“We’re making progress,” Weiss said. “I guess I don’t want to paint a bleak picture of the budgets that were submitted, but that said, there’s still some pencil sharpening that we’re going to have to go back a second time to them and say, ‘Good job, but we need, truly, 12.5%.'”
“I understand departments sort of hedging the bet a little because this is hard, but still, if everybody needs to do it, everybody needs to do it,” said Select Board Chair Susan Bronstein.
Weiss reaffirmed that this is simply the first step to working with departments and there is more work to be done.
“The town department heads are coming to the table,” Weiss said. “They are recognizing the seriousness of it. I think they’re putting in conservative budgets like we’re asking them to.”
For the upcoming budget, Weiss said there will be no cost-of-living increases for employees and no stipend for elected officials, including Select Board and Westhampton School Committee members.
Weiss said one of the “glaring omissions” of the upcoming budget is education, with two separate portions for Hampshire Regional High School and Westhampton Elementary School.
Weiss said it looks like the high school will have its first budget draft by the end of January and have a final draft by March 18, based on email exchanges he’s had with Dawn Scaparotti, Hampshire Regional’s business administrator.
Select Board member Scott Johndrow said it is likely Westhampton Elementary School’s budget will not be finished until the town receives the final portion Westhampton will have to contribute to the high school’s budget. Johndrow said the town has historically supported the schools and hopes that they will help the town this upcoming season.
Weiss said he estimates the town will host public hearings discussing the budget in the first weeks of April, prior to this year’s annual Town Meeting.
“There’s a lot here,” Weiss said about the upcoming town meeting. “There’s a lot of money on the table that townspeople are going to have to make some decisions about.”
Weiss talked more about the reason for the tough upcoming season. He said with past Proposition 2½ overrides, each year the town is getting further behind. Additionally, the town continues to rely on free cash to cover expenses, which he says is not a “sustainable” system.
“I have a hard time seeing our town voting for an override to cover this, but I think we have to try. That’s going to be my position and we haven’t voted in our finance committee meeting on it, so I can’t really speak for the finance committee, but I’ll speak for myself,” he said.
Also at the meeting, the Select Board approved to allow the Police Department to use funds from the current fiscal 2026 budget to hire another part-time officer until the new budget takes effect.