Croton Train Station Daily Parking Fee to Increase as Part of New Budget

Metro-North train users in Croton-on-Hudson will see a slight increase in parking fees this year.

As part of the $18,158,071 budget that was approved earlier this week, Croton village officials added an additional dollar to the maximum daily rate for train station parking, increasing it from $8 to $9..

Croton Mayor Leo Wiegman said increase is expected to bring an a conservative estimate of about $100,000 in revenue to the village next year. The increase was one of a number of ways officials were able to approve a budget and stay under the state’s mandated property tax cap.

“Our nontax revenue is $6.5 million and $2.9 million of that is train station parking lot, so about 45 percent of our nontax revenue is the parking lot,” Wiegman said.

A tentative budget proposal of $18.3 million was filed in March. That budget would have had a tax levy of about $11.2 million, which would have been well above the state mandated tax cap of 2.5 percent.

But village officials were able to whittle the  tax levy down to  $10,875,539, which is 2.41 percent more than this year’s tax levy.

In addition to the increased revenue that officials anticipate from the parking lot, they applied an additional $50,000 from the village’s fund balance to help decrease the fund balance.

In all, about $700,000 from the fund balance is being used to bring down the tax levy.

“We did that because almost $300,000 of the increase is from the increase in pension retirement contributions,” Wiegman said. “So we’re increasing from the appropriation from the retirement reserve appropriation to reflect that.”

Wiegman said no jobs were cut in this year’s budget. He said the equivalent of about four jobs have cut in the village in the past four years due to budget constraints.