City finances were the talk of Monday’s City Council meeting, from budget projections to purchasing new equipment for city boats.

Finance Director Peder Schaefer gave his mid-fiscal year budget projections, which he explained was slightly delayed due to him contracting COVID.

According to Schaefer, while the city is likely to still be running at a deficit over Fiscal Year 2024, the city is not in the red by nearly as much as was initially projected.

“Based on the things that have happened, that structural deficit is now down to $2.7 million,” Schaefer said. “So that’s the kind of current-year operating revenues vs. current-year expenses- we’re only going to have to use, right now, I’m projecting a little under $3 million as opposed to the $7 million that we expected when you approved the budget in May.”

What’s largely driven the lower-than-expected deficit has been property taxes and abatements, as well as a higher-than-expected amount of state aid, according to Schaefer. On the other end, Schaefer said that the Finance Department overestimated how much money the city would get for the sale of city property, though he noted that he expected the city to receive the remainder of his estimate of $2.5 million- the city has so far collected $600,000- in the next fiscal year.

Schaefer also came before the council asking for permission to change the statistical revaluation of property within the city, with a contract awarded to Vision Government Solutions, Inc. for $359,000 to do so.

Tax Assessor Neal Dupuis, according to Schaefer, has come up with a “hybrid revaluation” plan using his staff and a contractor. In the past, a full revaluation requiring an examination of every property every nine years was contracted. Statistical revaluations are done on the third and sixth year following a full revaluation.  Dupuis estimated the hybrid using new technologies available to the city could reduce the cost from of a full revaluation from $1.6 million to approximately $800,000.

“Sometimes it’s harder to save money than to spend money… that’s the situation we’re in,” Schaefer said. “I’m hoping that other communities are going to look at us and decide, ‘well, this is the way we should be doing it.’ But it’s going to be a little confusing on the bidding.”

Schaefer said that he would be before the council three more times to approve additional contracts related to the reappraisal.

A verbal exchange between Ward 3 Councilman Tim Howe and Ward 5 Councilman Ed Ladouceur also occurred over a bid to purchase and install electronic equipment for Harbor Master boats.

Ladouceur said that he would be voting in favor of the bid, though he had significant reservations on some aspects of it.

“I still disagree with some of the things that are in there, but to send it back out for a rebid, I think, would be punishing the vendor and punishing the harbormaster,” Ladouceur said. “But as I said earlier, I feel that the whole bid process needs to have an overview- this is my opinion now- we need to become more aggressive in approaching vendors and soliciting vendors to bid on this stuff, not to leave it up to them to have to do this.”

In particular, Ladouceur said that he hopes to see a more “business-friendly” approach to future bids, encouraging vendors to bid on items by making it so it won’t be a vendor’s responsibility to find out what’s up to bid.

Howe rebutted by asking Ladouceur why he hadn’t emailed Harbor Master Jeff Barris asking questions that he had over the last month, and said that he had an issue with him “taking potshots” at the bidding process and Harbor Master’s office.

He also questioned why Ladouceur made his statements during the full council meeting as opposed to the Finance Committee meeting, where Ladouceur announced that he would be speaking about the topic but decided against making those comments at the time when invited by Howe to do so.

“The reason why- and I’m not going to be fooled by what Councilman Ladouceur’s saying- the reason why he didn’t want to say it in committee is then, those people would have an opportunity to respond,” Howe said. “And when you can just throw veiled information out there, where no one can respond, it’s unfair.”

The bid ended up passing the full council 8-0, with Ward 1 Councilman William Foley not in attendance.

The next City Council meeting will be held on Monday, March 4.