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Blethen Maine News Service Sunday, March 11, 2007

Voters agreed to take $10,000 from last year's surplus funds instead of asking taxpayers to pay more for next year's $258,132 municipal operating costs.

Outgoing Selectman Sandra Howard said about $50,000 will come from several town accounts, bringing the total to about $308,000. Selectmen had expected to ask for $149,840 from tax dollars, but several accounts were calculated incorrectly.

"We can't produce a final figure, because we had a few accounts with errors, and we've been refiguring totals in several different categories," Selectman Fay Adams said. "People in town didn't question that these were honest errors. None of us have accounting degrees, and a lot of these calculations are pretty complex."

Voters appropriated an extra $25,000 from the revenue sharing account to cover an error in calculating Homestead Exemption revenues. They carried the error into a miscalculation of the final property tax rate. The tax rate of $12.05 per $1,000 of value should have been $12.08.

In elections from the floor, Frank Forster won a three-year term as selectmen over Scott Webber by five votes. Patricia Knapp, Richard Hargreaves, and John Cavanaugh were elected to two-year Planning Board terms. Summer road commissioner Earl Luce Jr. was re-elected.