For the first time in 10 years, the residents of Antis Township will see a tax increase.
At a meeting Monday, the supervisors agreed to the one-mill hike, which will cost the average taxpayer about $12 more a year, thus increasing township revenue by about $36,000.
“We sat, as a board of supervisors and we debated over that budget for quite awhile,” said Chairman Supervisor Leo Matuszewski. “Right now, we’re in deficit spending mode. We do have a nice capital reserve, but what’s going to happen is, if we don’t start doing some off-setting, that’s going to be gone in approximately four years at the rate we’re spending.”
In addition to a ‘yes’ vote by Matuszewski, Ray Amato and Charles Taylor also affirmed. Dissenting votes were cast by Ron Gensamer and Sonny Hornsberger. The ‘nay’ voters wanted to use the capital reserves to balance the budget.
“What we don’t want to do is impact the people hard in a couple of years if we cannot cut expenses and increase revenue in other places,” said Matuszewski. “If we increase one mill this year and get $36,000, and maybe next year, add another mill, we’ll then increase it by about $72,000. That would be getting us very close to doing the offset of the deficit spending.
“And at the same time, not hit our resident with a three, four or five-mill increase.”
According to Matuszewski, the supervisors met their goal of lessening the blow to residents and allows them time to watch how things even out.
“Maybe we’ll have revenue come in that we didn’t anticipate or maybe less expenses that we didn’t anticipate,” he said. “Possibly, we might be able to remove the mill at the end of the year.”
Despite the increase, Matuszewski said he felt the township kept things “under control fairly well” over the last ten years.
“As time goes on, expenses keep increasing automatically and you can’t control that,” he said. “We have a unionized labor force that negotiates a contract that we have to honor and other expenses just keep going up and up. It just takes more money to run the township than it did ten, five or even a year ago.”
The next scheduled meeting of the Antis Township Board of Supervisors is Monday, Jan. 7 p.m. at the township building.
