Council OKs 16 percent tax hike

New police hires also approved alongside budget

LANSDALE >> With just days to go before 2023 begins, council has made it official: taxes will be going up in Lansdale.

Council voted unanimously on Wednesday night to approve a one-mill tax hike, an increase of 16 percent or roughly $120 for the average homeowner.

“The budget this year will allow us to continue to provide the services that we do; it will allow us to invest in infrastructure; and it will allow us to invest into the safety of this community,” said borough Manager John Ernst.

Talks began in October on a first draft of a proposed 2023 budget, with projected revenues and expenses totaling just under $63 million across all funds, roughly $10 million in capital project spending, and $800,000 in increased personnel costs for eight new proposed employees, including four police officers, a new twoperson public works “pipe crew” tasked with inlet and pipeline repairs, and one new hire each in the town’s finance and parks and recreation departments.

November brought several different scenarios of tax and sewer rate increases to cover those increased costs, on Nov. 16 council deferred a final decision on the millage rate to December, and on Dec. 7 staff proposed, and council then voted to advertise, a one-mill tax increase that would bring the average resident’s tax bill to $870 a year, or $72.50 per month, up from the current $750 or $62.50 per month, for a homeowner with an average assessed property value of $120,000.

Those talks came to a conclusion Wednesday, after talks by council that reached a consensus on the third tax increase in four years, without requiring their first Dec. 31 meeting since 2017. Included in council’s meeting materials packet for approval was a 2023 tax ordinance setting the millage rate at a total of 7.25 mills, up from 6.25 mills set the year before, and allocating that amount as 4.22 mills for general purposes, 1.85 mills for debt service, 0.73 mills for the Lansdale Public Library, and 0.45 mills for fire safety.

The budget itself was passed unanimously with no discussion, but the tax ordinance drew comments from councilman BJ Breish, who vowed earlier this month to revisit each line item to look for costs to cut, and said Wednesday he had done so.

“We looked at every single line item; thanks to borough staff for answering all of my follow-up emails, there were many,” Breish said.

“To take a step down from 1 mill to 0.75, we needed to come up with about $203,000, so I went to work on closing that gap. I will say, I was happy to find about $83,000 that we could move around in the budget, and find some room,” he said.

Council vice president Mary Fuller said she thought Breish’s detailed look was similar to a scene in the 1993 movie Dave, when characters in that film do a similar budget review going line-byline through the federal budget.

Breish added that he’d continue to look into ways to cut costs and/or add revenues, including creating a short-term loan fund that could support residents’ infrastructure fixes on their own property, looking into changes to sidewalk repairs, a proposal from Mayor Garry Herbert to look into supplying public internet access throughout the town, and one of the town’s hotbutton issues that drew years of discussion in the 2010s.

“We could responsibly revisit single-hauler trash. Maybe there’s an opportunity there to help households save some money on costs and expenses,” he said.

Doing so allowed council to unanimously pass four more items that council President Denton Burnell said came out of a pre-meeting executive sessions, extending conditional offers of employment to four potential police officer candidates. Herbert and police chief Mike Trail both thanked council for doing so, as both had made the case in recent months for increasing police staffing levels.

“The expansion of our police department is necessary to continue to meet the needs and expectations of our community,” Herbert said. “It is our intention to utilize these officers to create a dedicated traffic department, fully focused on managing traffic and traffic-related challenges across the borough.”

Lansdale’s borough council next meets at 8:30 p.m. on Jan. 4, 2023 at the borough municipal building, 1 Vine Street. For more information visit www.Lansdale.org.