Thursday, April 20, 2000 Older Editions

Article 4: The budget - Selectmen trying to respond to needs, FinCom fearing the future

The differences aren't large, but the Finance Committee is sending taxpayers a message by breaking with selectmen in four areas of the budget.

The message? The town needs to watch how many new employees and programs it adds to the budget each year.

"It all related to looking at the budget and seeing a lot of expansion of town services. (The FinCom asked) were there areas that had new positions, that were adding new services? Can we afford to grow this fast?" says FinCom member Joanne Marden.

As a result, the FinCom fails to recommend adding some small, new positions or programs to the community-development, community-services and elder-services budgets.

Selectmen had supported these increases, especially the addition of a new worker to the quickly growing youth services budget, because they believed the services were important to the town and could not wait a year.

However, the FinCom is more concerned about the financial future.

"Basically, we've been looking ahead a few years to the opening of the new schools and we clearly have some financial problems to deal with," says Marden. "But the problems aren't out of our control. We're making those decisions that affect us. We made them last year, we're marking them this year.

"Our approach doesn't solve the problem. But we know we can make it not so bad if we just restrain ourselves now," she says.

The FinCom has also been pushing selectmen to pay for more of the Town Meeting projects with today's dollar, rather than bonding them and paying interest. Selectmen want to bond so Andover can put more into its stabilization fund, also known as the rainy-day fund.

Officials were continuing to discuss that issue this week.

"We're saying you don't take out your credit card to put money into your savings account," says Marden.

-- Neil Fater