Glass Houses

RSU 71 Budget Passes After City Officials Come Out Publicly Against RSU 71 Budget. Really?

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The RSU 71 budget and bus garage question both passed at the public vote on June 10th but, with apologies to Arlo Guthrie, this article is not really about RSU 71. This article is about the City Council of Belfast, and its reaction to the RSU 71 budget.

At the two most recent Belfast council meetings, members of the council hosted the RSU 71 superintendent (and one RSU board member), and then used the following meeting to opine on the RSU 71 budget, without any RSU 71 representatives present. In the second meeting, the Mayor spoke first, stating he would vote against the budget and the bus garage proposal because he “did not have enough information as to why we should support it.” Having followed the entire RSU 71 budget process, I can state emphatically that the school district has been very forthcoming with its budget. There was certainly disagreement from me and others about budgeting priorities, but the district did not lack for transparency, when questioned. If, at this point, a member of the public does not have enough information, it is because they have chosen not to look for it.

Now, contrast this with the City of Belfast. Instead of a robust budget, we get next to nothing — nine pages for the proposed 2025-26 budget. No staffing history. No salaries. No past expenses. No future projections. No capital expense explanations. No department narratives. Nothing. Just the bare minimum. I’ve contrasted Belfast with Rockland in the past because they are our polar opposite when it comes to budgeting. I’d urge you to check it out. Their 2024-25 budget clocked in at 130 pages to Belfast’s 10. Their 2025-26 is now meticulously detailed in 284 pages to our 9. Just their public safety budget (police and fire) takes up more pages and provides more information than Belfast’s entire budget. Rockland has the same population as Belfast. They just have wildly different budgeting priorities — chief among them is transparency. And to top it off, they have a 5-year capital improvement plan, a separate 95-page document laying out future plans. Belfast has no capital improvement plan.

When I ran for city council last year, I asked the city to publicly explain, in writing, the $1.4 million Capital Expense line item in the 2024-25 Budget — just to put out a simple explanation for what it is and where that money is going. If I were a sitting councilor, you can bet your bottom dollar that if someone wanted to know, in a town with 7,000 people, where $1.4 million was going, I would get that information out there for everyone to see. Now they’re putting over $1.7 million for capital expenses in the 2025-26 budget, again with no written explanation. Clearly, not a single member of the council or the city heard anything I had to say last fall about how they present their finances. It would have been so easy to shut me up about this, but instead they just keep ignoring reasonable calls for public transparency. I honestly don’t get it. What’s so hard about justifying your budget? I created dozens and dozens of budgets for HOAs, and if anyone asked for something so simple, I would get it to them and the entire HOA right away, because it’s their money and their budget, not mine.

The school district put out a detailed budget, then another, and then another. All were lengthy, and all were posted online well in advance of the meetings. The city has, to my knowledge, never even publicly produced a treasurer’s report, something that many cities consider a routine and necessary monthly business item. It’s never put any income and expense reports online. Even the proposed budgets are silent about actual expenses in past years. The city even makes basic math errors in its budgets, proving that no one is double-checking figures before releasing them. And don’t get me started on our audits. Belfast’s most recent audit was for 2021-22. Still no audit for 2022-23 or 2023-24 as we approach the end of the 2024-25 budget year in a few weeks. Rockland already has its 2022-23 and 2023-24 audits certified, and the most recent one was finished over five months ago¹. We’re two years behind them.

The city budget has grown from $8.9 million² in 2015-16 to $16.0 million in 2025-26, an 80% increase over the past 10 years, while CPI inflation has increased 38% and Belfast’s population has barely budged³. The school budget has increased from $22.1 million to $32.9 million during that same period — up 49%⁴. I’d say the school district has done a much better job managing its expenses and keeping them in line with inflation. In fact, I have zero doubts that RSU 71 is in good hands, management-wise, when it comes to finances.

After the district explained the reasoning for needing a new bus garage, they asked voters to use $1.5 million of already existing money to buy a former MBNA maintenance building — which is big enough to fit several buses inside. They also intend to purchase a ton of associated infrastructure — which itself would cost way more than a million dollars to build from scratch — and a good deal of land. They are trying to be proactive before the state condemns the current site due to underground fuel tanks (which are a known brownfield hazard⁵); plus, the current bus garage is an aging building of low construction quality and is not renovation grade. Contrast this with Belfast, which waited until it was almost too late to replace its DPW building in 2019, overpaid for a piece of land and rushed construction of an out-of-place building in a rural neighborhood, complete with an access road, urban-grade streetlights, and $9 million in borrowed expenses to do it. The RSU is being smart about jumping on a once-in-a-blue-moon deal that has come up with the nonprofit PCHC offering up a piece of the former MBNA property well below market value. To pass this up would certainly be penny-wise and pound-foolish.

City councilors are concerned with the impact on tax bills due to the school department increase this year and are confused about RSU 71’s management of reserve money. Fair enough. So was I initially, but even though I’m the only one really writing about RSU 71’s budget due to our mostly absent local media, and even though I worked through all these questions already and laid out exactly how the RSU is managing the accumulated surplus by returning it to taxpayers over several years, it’s clear that councilors are neither reading this nor reaching out to the RSU to get answers to these questions.

Another city council member bemoaned that the school district is “hitting us hard,” with “us” presumably being the city government of Belfast itself. So, he’s opposed to the school budget as well. The mayor and this councilor cited the 2024 revaluation as another issue that is burdening taxpayers, forcing some people to move out of town because they can no longer afford the taxes here. I’ve covered the revaluation process extensively here (please dive into this series if you haven’t already), and a revaluation is supposed to correctly distribute property taxes — it does not increase them⁶. But, when you take a valuation system that was already broken and heavily regressive against modest properties, and then refuse to do a proper revaluation, and instead do a limited one with no public process, no transparency and no accountability by having the interim assessor and another part-time hourly contractor attempt to do a 20-year overdue revaluation that would typically cost $300,000 to $400,000 from a professional firm, what the hell did you think was going to happen? Well, I’ll tell ya — they made the valuations even more regressive and passed even more of a tax burden on people who can afford it the least. The school district did not do this. The City of Belfast did this. These homeowners should have seen tax decreases through a revaluation, despite inflationary increases in the budget, but instead they got tax bills that defied reason, and frankly violated the Maine State Constitution’s requirement that property be taxed on its fair market value in relation to other properties. Instead, one year later, after a botched mass appraisal that masqueraded as a revaluation, a home that sells in Belfast for over $500,000 has about a 0% chance of being over-assessed and a home that sells under $300,000 has a 50% chance of being over-assessed⁷. So sorry, Belfast owns the tax burden issue and has no high horse to sit on until it does a full and proper revaluation (spoiler alert, we won’t get one in 2025-26 because the City Council is continuing to ignore this issue).

Another city councilor went on the record against the school budget, just to pile on (none of the remaining councilors spoke in favor of it — so much for supporting our school population). So, let’s revisit the city budget in the past three years, then, since we’re throwing stones now. In 2022-23, it was $12.2 million. In 2025-26, it is $16.0 million. That’s nearly 32% more spent in three years. Councilors are crapping all over the school budget, which has grown, despite a 9% increase this year, from $29.5 million to $32.9 million in the past three years — 12% total. Which entity is overburdening taxpayers, then? Who has the spending problem?

In the May 6 meeting, the Mayor cited an oft-repeated (and misrepresented) figure that “70% of our property taxes goes to the schools,” also saying it’s been “between 63% and 65%” over the last couple of years. If you’re new to Belfast, this complaint is a routine sport for the City Council — it would be a rare occurrence indeed if an entire year went by without someone on the council blaming the school district for all of your tax bill woes. This is 100% bunk, to begin with, because the 2024-25 tax bills stated that the school district accounted for 52.25% of property taxes. This number has actually been going down. In 2017, it was 59.24% — I took these numbers directly from my tax bills. You’re now aware why it’s going down — the city’s budgets are far outstripping inflation, and the RSU budgets are doing their best to stay in line with it. Is it because the city has added too much staff? Possibly, but who knows, because no staffing history has ever been publicized. Spending too much on capital projects? We don’t even know where that money goes.

And then there’s this whole dance the city does when it cites these numbers. Everyone here probably knows that a budget consists of revenues and expenses, and a balanced budget zeroes these two items out against each other. Last year, the City of Belfast took in $8.8 million in non-property tax revenues (permits, harbor fees, licenses, etc.) and $20.0 million in property taxes. So then, total revenues were $28.8 million collected by the city, with that money earmarked for the city, schools and county — our collective expenses. $15.7 million went to the city budget, $10.9 million to the schools, and $2.1 million to the county⁸. So, total money to the schools was more like 38% of all revenue⁹. All this money goes into the same pot, and pretending that only property tax revenues go to the school district, to me, has always been disingenuous. Sure, the city can present it that way, but math is math, and spin is spin.

The hard truth is that the RSU 71 budget was a tough pill to swallow this year, and that’s why the process and vote was contentious, because residents in the other RSU 71 towns are not used to increases like this. I went through the challenges of the RSU 71 budget in this newsletter — it didn’t make the 9% increase easy to take, but we understood it and understood the consequences of rejecting that budget — our schools would not get better, and the district’s long-term issues¹⁰ would get magnified and possibly pushed to a rushed solution. The district, with the budget and bus garage questions passing, will hopefully not squander the opportunity to address its issues.

The RSU 71 budget came with a high level of scrutiny and two public votes. The City of Belfast is a black hole when it comes to budgeting — it offers little in writing, offers no transparency and continues to ask more and more of taxpayers with seemingly very little accountability. It’s the pot calling the kettle black, and we should not stand for it. We don’t get referendums on city budgets — should we? What would our staffing look like if last year’s 16% increase was on the table for voters to reject? If city councilors are going to come out, on the city’s behalf, in a public meeting to urge against voting for the school budget, the city better be prepared to hold itself to the same standards when homeowners turn their attention to the council after they’ve received their tax bills in a couple of months. I really hope they’re finally prepared to be fully transparent about finances.

1. Though not directly related to budgets, Belfast has now gone 1,620 days without updating our ordinance book.

2. Source city budget 2015-16 from city website. The total budget includes the wastewater fund, but this is an enterprise fund and I have pulled it out of the official 9.7 million budget that year. As of 2024-25 the Belfast budget no longer includes the wastewater figure in its totals, so this is the apples-to-apples comparison.

3. population grew a total of 6% from 2015-2025.

4. 7/18/25 update — I have corrected these numbers in a recent post, titled Taxation Pressures. It turns out the 2015-16 number I cited here was the “minimum required budget” per a state DOE worksheet. The actual budget number is $25.2 million and the actual increase over 10 years is 31% — less than official rates of inflation. I’m not editing this in the post, because it changes the tone of the writing too much.

5. It used to be common for fuel tanks to be placed underground, before there were rigorous environmental requirements surrounding this type of use. Old tanks are grandfathered, that is, until they leak.

6. Portland understands this, because they are doing revaluations every five years now. Per The Press Herald, city spokesperson Jessica Grondin wrote “If revaluations aren’t conducted regularly, then owners of more valuable properties experience the equivalent of a tax break, while owners of less valuable properties pay a relatively higher price for the same public services.” Hmm. Belfast has gone more than 20 years without a full revaluation. Does the city really care about equity?

7. I did a recent scan of sales in Belfast. The last 10 single family homes that sold above $500k were all valued less than their sales price. Of the last 10 homes that sold under $300k, half of them sold at prices below their valuation.

8. The numbers are slightly off due to rounding.

9. This number climbs to 39% for 2025-26 because the school district sees a 9% increase this year. But last year our share of the school budget increased 6% while the city budget increased 16%., so while 2025-26 slightly reverses the trend, the overall trend line has not changed — Belfast’s budget continues to grow at a rate outpacing inflation.

10. Consolidation, dropping student population, no real leadership (no permanent Superintendent going on two years), decreasing state aid.