$5.4M-plus 2020 budget approved at D-F town meeting

DOVER-FOXCROFT — All 10 items passed as written during the 2019 annual town meeting on the morning of April 27 in the gymnasium at the Morton Avenue Municipal Building. The $5,470,475 municipal budget figure for the 2019-20 fiscal year approved across the financial articles will now go to referendum on Tuesday, June 11 for a validation vote

The $5,470,475 gross municipal budget represents a $451,120 increase (8.99 percent) from the current fiscal year. The approximate $5.4 million would be offset by just under $2.56 million in revenues, an amount up by $354,360 or 16.07 percent from the figure for 2018-19. The result would be a net amount of $2,911,010 to be raised through property taxes, an increase of $96,760 or 3.44 percent.

One item OKed on Saturday morning asked if $310,000 would be raised and appropriated for town roads, to go along with an anticipated $90,000 from the state for a total of $400,000 to be used in 2019 as part of a 10-year paving management plan.

Town Manager Jack Clukey was asked about the road work schedule for this year.

“Pleasant Street is a priority,” he said. “Dwelley Avenue was done last year but we want to be sure we ditch so the road will have a longer life, Davis Street, Forest Avenue. There’s always more needs than money and we don’t know what asphalt prices will be.”

Clukey fielded a question on a plan for fixing South Street/Route 7 by saying “That is an improvement plan that (the Maine Department of Transportation) would do, I don’t know what the short-term plan would be.” He said the Dover & Foxcroft Water District is looking to replace a water main under the travelway so all involved would like to coordinate the projects.

“That’s going to take a few years, nothing this year, nothing next year,” Clukey said about Route 7.

Town meeting attendees also approved a selectmen’s order of discontinuance of a public easement associated with a former portion of the Dawes Road extending south from the Department of Conservation trail to Route 15.

“We’re not going to affect that trail at all,” Clukey said about a path adjacent to the former public easement. He said in the past the Dawes Road continued to West Main Street but in 1982 the town discontinued this section and in the decades since Foxcroft Academy athletic fields have been built over the fourth of a mile stretch.

“It’s disappeared except on paper,” he said. “We’re going to formally extinguish what is left on paper of the old Dawes Road on the Foxcroft Academy campus. I don’t think anyone at FA wants a public way going through their indoor track,” he added about a planned sports complex.

On the June 11 referendum Dover-Foxcroft residents will vote on a pair of positions, for terms of three years apiece, for both the select and school boards. The referendum will include a three-year position on the HAD 4 board of directors as well as another one-year seat for the hospital group and a one-year term on the Thompson Free Library Executive Committee.

The ballot also has questions on a revised land use ordinance and a revised shoreland zoning ordinance as well as a question on the RSU 68 school budget, which will also go to voters in the fellow district towns of Charleston, Monson and Sebec on June 11.