Webster opens 2027 budget season with raises not yet negotiated

Six town departments and the justice court brought opening 2027 budget requests to the Webster Town Board on Thursday, at the first of two public workshops that open the town's budget season. Assessing, finance, human resources, information technology, parks and recreation, the court and communications each walked the board through a request. Every figure they presented shares the same missing piece: none of them include a cost-of-living adjustment for town employees.

That is deliberate, and it was disclosed before the first department spoke. Finance Director Paul Adams told the board the budget carries no COLA because the town's union contracts all expire at the end of 2026 and negotiations for new ones are underway. "Once we know that number we'll put it in," he said. Step increases, the scheduled movement of employees up a pay scale, are already built in. That movement is not itemized. It sits inside each salary line, which is why the worksheets put no price on it.

The placeholder is the largest open variable in the 2027 budget. Personnel accounts for about 55% of Webster's annual budget. The town's own 2026 budget message puts employee compensation, benefits and retiree benefits together at that share of a $48.4 million net expenditure budget, and a consultant's proposal to handle the town's labor negotiations, posted in the town's online document center, states it as 55.5%. Three union contracts, covering roughly 125 full-time employees, all expire Dec. 31, 2026. That is unusual on its own: the same proposal notes the CSEA and police contracts have historically been offset by a year. The proposal also puts a price on precision. "A settlement difference of ¼% per year saves $255,000 during a three-year contract period," it states.

A budget workshop is a particular kind of event. Department heads explain their own numbers to the board that oversees them. The chair said at the open that this was a workshop rather than a formal board meeting, with no public comment period, and there was no opposing party in the room. Each department posted a worksheet with the workshop agenda, dated July 14, showing 2027 against 2026 line by line. The numbers below come from those worksheets. That makes them checkable. It does not make them settled. Every line is a department request, none of it carries COLA, and the compiled tentative budget the supervisor files with the town clerk is still to come.

Assessing: the revaluation spike starts coming down

Assessing brought the night's largest decrease by a wide margin. The worksheet takes the amount to be raised by taxes from $844,704 to $625,509, a drop of $219,195.

The driver is the townwide revaluation. The town pays its revaluation contractor for a full twelve months in 2026 but not in 2027. The reassessments line falls from $264,000 to $83,000, and Assessor Donna Komor told the board that the remaining money "will disappear in 2028." It does not reach zero in 2027. "That's the spike year and I'm coming back down closer to normal," she said.

Two lines move the other way, both tied to what comes after a revaluation. Wages for the Board of Assessment Review triple, from $5,000 to $15,000, and legal consulting rises from $12,000 to $15,000, in anticipation of more property owners challenging their new assessments. Komor called the grievance-wage figure a best guess and said she may revise it, pending a board decision on adding members to the review board.

Property owners are in the data-correction phase of that revaluation now. The town had asked that any changes to property inventory be made and returned by Aug. 1.

Finance: an AI invoice module, and an unbudgeted arbitrage check

Adams put his department's total appropriations at about $570,000, up roughly $29,000, covering three full-time employees and one part-time. That figure spans two blocks on the worksheet: $523,124 for the finance department against $496,842 in 2026, plus a separate audit accounting block of $47,000 against $44,800. Together, $570,124 against $541,642, an increase of $28,482. The finance department's own $523,124 draws $463,124 from the tax levy in 2027, against $436,842 in 2026. A $60,000 transfer from the sewer fund covers the difference.

The new item is a Munis Automation Module, an add-on to the town's financial software that would use AI to pull information off invoices. Adams budgeted about $4,500 to implement it and roughly $1,500 for training, and he volunteered the caveats: the product is still in development, is being beta tested at a couple of other sites, and is not expected to be fully available until the end of the year. "I put it in the budget, but it's kind of an unknown whether we're actually gonna go with it or not at this point," he said. His part-time personnel line does fall, from $24,812 to $18,850. Asked directly whether that reflected the automation, he said no. "I've actually have not reduced any of the employee costs due to the automation."

Also in the request: $6,000 to engage a third-party consultant as the town's Munis systems administrator, which Adams framed as an internal-control improvement after former Director of Personnel Brayton Connard, who had handled many of those duties, retired. The financial consultants line rises by exactly that amount, from $10,800 to $16,800.

One item has no money behind it. Adams told the board he did not include a consultant for an arbitrage calculation, the check on how much interest a municipality earns on money it borrowed for capital projects. Earnings above a federal limit have to be rebated to the IRS. Webster borrowed $101,141,000 in August 2025 through a bond anticipation note and a serial bond, and Adams said he has been tracking the earnings himself. "We probably should have the calculation done sooner than later," he said.

Human resources: a $17,000 decrease, almost all of it one line

Director of Personnel Kelsey Feeney presented a budget down about $17,000, and said nearly all of it comes from a single line. Human resources takes $123,569 from the tax levy in 2027 against $141,236 in 2026, a drop of $17,667, and the director of personnel salary alone accounts for $16,407 of that, falling from $102,876 to $86,469. Feeney gave the board the reason. Connard was at the top step of the pay scale, she said, and she is not.

Information technology: a deferred year catches up

Information technology's capital line jumps from $21,300 to $103,908, nearly fivefold and the largest single line increase in the seven worksheets. The department takes $377,140 from the tax levy in 2027 against $302,083 in 2026. Director of Information Technology Steve Peace framed the jump as deferral catching up rather than growth: the 2026 capital line came in far below a historical norm he put near $70,000, because a network infrastructure upgrade consumed the year and nothing new was bought.

The main 2027 items are three new servers, which Peace said he hopes to get for about $15,000 apiece, additional Wi-Fi access points for the recreation and highway departments, and a roughly $30,000 one-time software purchase licensed for 44 months so it expires alongside the support on equipment already installed.

Peace listed offsets, and the worksheet carries them. Computer system technical support falls from $38,700 to $32,731 as the town drops outside monitoring contracts and brings that work in house. The worksheet lists exactly three payroll lines: a network administrator at $94,907, a systems assistant at $75,112 and a help-desk position at $50,482.

Parks and recreation: the last of the ARPA money

Parks and Recreation Commissioner Chris Bilow gave the longest presentation, covering seniors, recreation and parks. Across all three accounts he put 2027 revenue at $1,419,600 against appropriations of $3,077,273, calling them up about 6% and about 5%. The worksheets match both totals to the dollar: revenue rises 6.1% and appropriations 5.6%. The request includes no new full-time positions.

The recreation center billed about 560 monthly memberships before COVID and roughly 200 at the pandemic trough. "This past month we were at 760," Bilow said, well above the pre-COVID peak. Membership revenue rises from $210,000 to $260,000, while drop-in classes fall from $20,000 to $7,500 as people who try a single class convert to full memberships.

This is also the department where Webster's remaining federal pandemic aid runs out, and it does not appear as a line item. There is no ARPA entry anywhere in the worksheets, in either year. The town has been using American Rescue Plan Act money to offset senior and youth program costs, and Bilow said the remaining funds "are gone actually as of November this year." The federal deadline for spending State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds is Dec. 31, 2026.

On the seniors side, Bilow flagged one revenue assumption. The town budgets nutrition revenue conservatively, he said, because "we do have some seniors that even that daily lunch fee is a struggle."

Department-wide, tax support rises 5.2%, slightly slower than spending, and that total conceals a split. The amount raised by taxes for the senior account rises 17.5%, from $54,539 to $64,109, and for recreation 14.8%, from $591,920 to $679,586. Those are the two areas Bilow named as ARPA-funded, "both in our senior as well as our youth program areas." The park account moves the other way, down 1.6% to $913,978, mostly because capital improvements fall from $150,000 to $80,000, and that decline is what pulls the department total back down. The programs continue and no new positions were requested.

The two accounts Bilow named are the two rising fastest. How much of that the end of the federal money accounts for cannot be read off these worksheets, which carry no ARPA line in either year. Part of it is not ARPA. About $27,500 of recreation's increase is a part-time payroll line Bilow said had been broken out of another line and should have carried about $26,000 in 2026. Net that out and recreation's tax support rises about 10% rather than 14.8%.

Across the three accounts, tax support rises by $81,937. One board member added the caveat that applies to every number presented Thursday: "of course we don't have the COLA in there."

Justice court: $180,862 collected, $83,230 kept

The justice court presented a small and stable budget. Appropriations total $375,788, up $3,545 from 2026, against $82,000 in budgeted fine revenue, leaving $293,788 to be raised by taxes. The justices' salaries are unchanged at $102,760, or $51,380 each. Court security rises from $49,000 to $52,000.

Judge Thomas DiSalvo turned to what a town court actually returns to the town. He handed out the State Comptroller's report showing Webster court fines of $180,862 in 2025. Comptroller's Justice Court Fund data for the Town of Webster puts the exact total at $180,862.50, of which $79,257.25 went to New York State, $18,375.00 to Monroe County and $83,230.25 back to the Town of Webster. That is a distribution of money actually collected in 2025, not the $82,000 the town has penciled in as fine revenue for 2027.

"We're not in the business of collecting fines," DiSalvo said, describing fines as set against the offense and the defendant's ability to pay. He also said state legislation, which he placed in June 2023, took away the court's ability to have a driver "scoffed" for unpaid fines, and that this has had "a chilling effect" on collection.

Communications: three new lines, and year four of five

Director of Communications Bridget Harvey presented for the town's newest department, which takes $179,863 from the tax levy in 2027 against $176,275 in 2026. Three lines that carried nothing in 2026 are funded: subscriptions at $2,400 for design, recording and email software; citizen outreach at $1,200 for production and postage on other departments' mailings, including the revaluation and the comprehensive plan; and mileage at $400 for a communications assistant who travels between town locations nearly daily in a personal vehicle.

The $20,000 website design and maintenance line is the town's contract with its website vendor, spread across a five-year redesign cycle now in its fourth year. Both staff and board members expressed frustration with the platform, describing it as not user friendly, and a board member undertook to review the contract for flexibility. "If there's flexibility in that contract, I'll find it," the member said.

What happens next

Across the seven units that presented, the amount to be raised by taxes comes to $3,767,666 for 2027 against $3,813,919 for 2026, down $46,253 before COLA. Assessing's one-time revaluation drop accounts for more than all of it. Strip Assessing out and the other six rise 5.8%.

The big departments have not been heard yet. Highway, police, sewer, the library, the town clerk, community development and engineering did not present Thursday, and the chair closed by telling the room, "I will see you all next week for all of the big ones." A second budget workshop is set for Thursday, Aug. 6 at 4:30 p.m., according to a July 22 column in which Supervisor Alex Scialdone called the workshops "the midpoint of the budget process." The town posted that agenda Monday, and it schedules those seven remaining units between 4:30 and 6:10 p.m. That same evening the Town Board holds its regular meeting, which includes a public hearing on Local Law No. 3, set by board motion July 16.

After the workshops, the numbers move through the rest of the process: a tentative budget filed with the town clerk, board review, a preliminary budget published for the public, a hearing, and a vote. Every figure presented Thursday will change at least once before then, because none of them include the raises.

AI tools were used in drafting and research.