Why Marlborough's 2025 Budget Is Increasing By Nearly 5%

MARLBOROUGH, MA — Budget season has officially arrived in Marlborough, with Mayor Christian Dumais on Monday handing his fiscal year 2024 budget proposal to councilors.

The new budget — which will go into effect July 1 after councilors approve it — includes a nearly 4.68 percent increase in spending over the current (2024) fiscal year. Dumais told councilors the change is largely due to increases in school funding, higher utility costs and seven union contracts expiring this year.

Dumais' $196.5 million fiscal 2025 budget proposal is close to $9 million higher than former mayor Arthur Vigeant's proposal last year, and includes many changes to city spending. But in context, Vigeant's 2024 proposal was about a 4.5 percent increase over 2023.

"My intention was to present what I believe to be a conservative budget that maintains the current level of services and represents the existing structure of financial priorities," Dumais said in a budget message to councilors. "My intention in doing this is not to keep with status quo, but to take this first full budget cycle to see what we can improve upon as an organization and how we can accomplish that through future budgets."

Here are some items of note in the mayor's proposed budget:

New positions

Dumais wants to hire a city communications director for his office and capital projects manager for the Department of Public Works. Those new roles would be offset by the removal of four positions from the budget: a payroll manager, the assistant commissioner of facilities, assistant city engineer and a Health Department substance abuse coordinator. That last position will be paid for with opioid settlement funds instead of directly from the city budget.

Schools funding

Dumais' first budget will also be the first time school funding — including Marlborough public and Assabet Valley — has reached nine figures. Dumais wants to spend about $103 million on schools, 6.2 percent higher than the $97.8 million spent for fiscal 2024.

The Marlborough Public Schools portion of that total is about $76.2 million, about 6 percent or $3.8 million higher than fiscal 2024. The increase is almost entirely due to an anticipated $4 million the district will have to spend on pay and benefits increases as it negotiates new union contracts. Only about $250,000 of the 2025 increase is for non-union items, according to the district's budget book.

Assabet, meanwhile, will get a 15 percent increase, equivalent to nearly $1 million for fiscal 2025.

Salary increases

The single largest increase in Dumais' entire budget is for the reserve for salaries account: it'll rise 300 percent from $300,000 to $1.2 million with those seven union contracts up for negotiation.

Other notable increases include electric utility bumps for the city and the school district of 22 and 27 percent, respectively, for a total of about 840,000 in fiscal 2025.

Decreases

Some departments will see funding decreases in fiscal 2025, including police ($6,100), fire ($78,000), city assessor ($108,000) and the comptroller ($117,000). Most of those decreases are due to salary and benefits reductions in those departments, according to the budget book.

Now that Dumais has handed councilors his version of the budget, the council's finance committee will next hold a public hearing on it May 20.