BY Molly Congdon
Gazette Reporter
HALFMOON—On Wednesday, September 16, Halfmoon Town Supervisor Kevin Tollisen announced that Moody’s Investors Service had removed the negative financial outlook on the Town of Halfmoon and replaced it with a stable one.
“The Moody’s Investors report shows that over the past few years the town has taken a conservative approach to its budget and we have made operational changes where we are actually reviewing budget items each month to ensure that what is budgeted, as far as what is budgeted, we are actually receiving revenues to pay for those items so that we’re not looking at surplus or general fund balance to pay for these items,” Tollisen said. “Where we’ve needed to cut throughout the year, we’ve made adjustments to the budget and basically made sure that our budget that we created, that the actual money that we’re receiving is in constant check monthly.”
He continued: “We hold meetings every month with our department managers and the first thing that we go over is the budget, and you know last year I’ll tell you that we had to cut significantly from the budget because the numbers just weren’t there; all of our department managers scrimped and saved and did everything they could do within their own budgets to spend only on those items that were critically necessary. Because of that we are able to come out saving some money. We have good staff who work diligently with me to make sure that everything is constantly being analyzed.”
Several things needed to be snipped to make the stable label an actuality. “One of the biggest things that we had to cut was $420,000 on the mortgage tax, because the mortgage tax that was budgeted versus what we were actually getting was significantly less, so we had to make cuts across the board,” Tollisen said. “We had an employee leave—retire, which had a significant salary plus benefits so instead of replacing that salary and benefits; we decided that that job could be done by a professional corporation and ended up saving significantly.”
That, of course, was just the start. “We’ve also refunded and re-bonded some of our existing debts,” Tollisen said. “We’ve done that twice, so the total savings of the last two years is about $1.6 million to town residents. I think for Moody’s, they see that we have a very, very aggressive stand toward trying to save where we can within the reality we have to deal with; for myself looking at it, as supervisor, we are constantly seeing increased costs for health insurance and we have to keep our expenses as low as possible.”
“The town has had some bond decreases over the past couple of years and they site the decreases in our bond rating because during those difficult years of what I’m going to call the recession, during those years of economic downturn, the town board made a decision instead of raising taxes to use fund balance,” he said. “When I took over I think the general fund balance, which is basically a savings account, was about $28,000. Moody’s recently saw that, since that period, the town of Halfmoon has increased their general fun balance to $1.2 million; we are very proud of the fact that we’ve cut where we’ve had to cut while still providing proper services to our residents—that’s what we need to continue to try to do, which is always a challenge due to rising costs for general operations.”
There is also even more hope for future savings. “We have, while it’s not operational yet we’re going to see a significant change in next year’s budget,” Tollisen said. “We installed solar panels on our town properties and we are supposed to see $175,000 starting next year with respect to our utility bills.”
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