Washington County is endeavoring to pay off a multi-million-dollar emergency budget shortfall. A public referendum asking voters to borrow the money failed in November. Plan B is to ask towns in the county to pay a portion of their taxes early. In Cutler this week, residents weighed in on the fiscal quandary.
It's a Tuesday evening at the Bay Ridge Elementary School in Cutler, and more than 30 town residents have converged on the gymnasium for the annual town meeting.
Many of the articles on the warrant are standard fare, such as funding for the volunteer fire department. But this year, it's the town's annual appropriation for Washington County that's getting much of the attention.
The TAN (Tax Anticipation Note) is an annual loan the county takes out to cover operations until tax payments come in. And this year, county officials said they don't have the funds to pay off the TAN, because of poor accounting practices in recent years that devastated the county's finances.
So they've come to the towns, hat in hand, asking for early tax payments.
"We're here tonight because of this ask for the towns to pay that 2025 TAN off early, pay their commitment early, so we can pay that off and then not be in default," said Washington County Commissioner Courtney Hammond.
After making his pitch to the residents of Cutler, Hammond assured them that steps are being taken to make sure this never happens again. Resident Julie Diniz said she came to the meeting wanting to know more about those preventative steps.
"My main concern was the continued poor management," she said. "There's a lot of what has happened, what was before, who did what. Nobody's here that did the thing. Great. All right, how are you going to keep from it happening again?"
Diniz said she voted no on the bond proposal back in November, but feels Hammond brought the right kind of answers to the meeting.
"Which is the useful information to assure us that it's not going to happen again," she said. "So it seems that they've done their due diligence to prevent that."
Fellow resident Mark Smith said he didn't see the problem as all that unmanageable to begin with.
"I mean, for a town like Cutler, the $130,000 didn't seem like such a big deal," he said. "It's not like we've got millions to deal with so I think, you know, it's digestible. We'll deal with it."
And Smith said he can understand how things might have gotten out of hand at the county level, because the town has had similar struggles.
"We've had the same problem," he said. "We got in big trouble the last several years. We had a town clerk that left very suddenly, and since then, it was hard, scrambling, trying to put all the pieces back together."
Washington County manager Renée Gray said more than 25 towns have agreed to make the early payments. And some that have declined are now reconsidering.
As for the town of Cutler, the article passes with a majority, and brings the county one town closer to breaking even.
