Council Approves Budget

By Cynthia Drummond for BRVCA

May 7th 2025

RICHMOND – With member Jeffrey Dinsmore opposed, the Town Council approved the 2025-2026 municipal budget.

The vote concluded a second public hearing into the $8.3 million spending plan, which residents will vote on in a referendum on June 3.      

The budget does not call for a property tax increase, but critics, including Louise Dinsmore, called for further reductions.    

“I see that you’ve been creative in not raising taxes, however, the spending and the growth of this local government for a town of 8,000 people remains concerning to me,” she told the council. “In Fiscal Year ’24, Richmond spent $7.2 million on its budget. Just two fiscal years later, you are increasing spending to $8.36 million dollars. That represents a 14% increase.”

Dinsmore took exception to several expenses in the new budget:  $60,000 for a grant writer, (a contract position) the need for the town to have its own municipal court, the addition of a full-time position in the Town Clerk’s office, and increases in the budgets for legal services and the recreation department.

“Your slate of candidates touted sustainable growth as a tag line,” she said. “I don’t believe that this is sustainable growth. This budget represents government bloat.”

Thomas Marron, who, in 2024, ran unsuccessfully for Town Council, suggested that the council had underestimated the intelligence and engagement of the residents.

“The only thing the council has to do is follow the example of Marie Antoinette and say ‘let them eat cake,’” he said. “What is the pollical experts had it wrong? What if the people really do want to know? They want to know how you pulled off this extraordinary creative accounting miracle called the budget.”

Other residents praised the council for presenting a budget that would meet the needs of the community without raising taxes.

After a discussion among council members, council Vice President Mark Reynolds said he had gone through the budget again, focusing on the capital improvement plan, and had found several possible reallocations that would save the town money and maintain services.

One of those, he said, is the $100,000 set aside for the municipal resiliency fund, which could be reduced to $50,000.

With the recent settlement with the Preserve of litigation over tax assessments, the terms of which have not been disclosed, the town will save $35,000 it had budgeted for legal services.

Reynolds explained additional reductions he had found.

“It was allocated for the Beaver River Park invasive species elimination project, $10,000, that’s not going to be funded through a grant and the match for that grant is in the Heritage Trail capital improvement plan, so we don’t need that $10,000 for Beaver River Park anymore,” he said. So, we’ve got between, probably, $135,000 to $145,000 there if you add all those things up.”

Reynolds proposed increasing the town’s contribution to Wood River Health Services from the $1,500 budgeted to the amount requested, $3,500.

Council President Samantha Wilcox ended the discussion with a summary of the reallocations.

“We’re reducing legal by $35,000, MRP [municipal resiliency program] culvert project by $43,500, we’re moving from the wage contingency $50,000 to have $120,500 to fund post- employment benefits and the wage adjustments,”  she said. (Those adjustments total $108,500.)

“Basically, we’re just moving money to fund it without increasing the budget, so the budget stays the same,” Reynolds noted.

Following the vote to adopt the budget, the council agreed to simplify the referendum ballot question, which will ask voters to approve or reject the budget, as adopted by the Town Council.

Public Forum

Town Planner Talia Jalette said the state housing plan had been released and would be open for public comment until May 23.

Several residents commented on the April 29 council meeting, during which supporters of the Buttonwoods MX motocross track verbally attacked councilor Dan Madnick for proposing to include motorsports in the town’s business regulations.

Waste and Recycling

The council, with Department of Public Works Director Gary Robar, discussed the town’s new contract with Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation for solid waste and recycling.

The price charged to the town will be $63 per ton, the same fee the town pays now.

The contract, the details of which are available on the town’s website, will run from July 1, 2025 to June 30, 2027.

The Dog Park

Gary Robar provided an update on work currently underway to re-grade the dog park. With the grading complete, Robar said the next step would involve seeding the area with a grass mixture. The park would be closed for at least two weeks as the seed is established.

“The only thing is, he’s going to have to shut the place down for two to four weeks,” Robar said.

Wilcox said she was surprised by the length of the closure, and asked how much lead time the town would have to notify residents of the closure.

“We still have plenty of time,” Robar said. “We want to stay away from late June, July and August. So, we get a day and we just go.”

Road Repairs

Dan Madnick has asked the DPW to prepare short, medium and long-term plans for repairing the town’s deteriorating roads.

Madnick said he wanted the plans to include information of how roads conditions are assessed, how road work is  prioritized, the types of repairs that are available, and the timelines for different repairs.

“I just think that this council, this town has a really big opportunity right now to really handle our infrastructure issues that we haven’t had the ability to do before,” he said.