Board of Finance To Seek Pension Bond Instead

By Wiley Wood

Reversing its endorsement of a new firehouse, the Board of Finance agreed at its October 8 meeting to delay plans to fund the facility for at least two to three years. Instead it will focus efforts on removing the town’s unfunded pension liability from its books.

The message was brought to the Emergency Services Building Committee on October 9 by First Selectman Sue Dyer. In response, the town-appointed committee asked to be disbanded.

The conceptual drawings for the new facility will revert to the selectman’s office. Although commissioned last fall at the cost of $35,000, the architect’s plans are uncertain to be used if the firehouse project is ever revived. “You don’t know what’s going to happen in two or three years,” said committee member Ron Zanobi, “and the code changes a little every cycle anyway.” The plans were never formally adopted by fire department members.

“I can’t believe they didn’t take it to the next step,” says Leo Colwell, a selectman who has served nine years on the building committee, the last four specifically devoted to the firehouse project. “If they had taken it to a public hearing, we could find out whether the town is in favor of the firehouse or not.”

Last fall, the chairman of the finance board, Michael Sconyers, was pressed by the building committee to set an acceptable price for a new firehouse, the old one being widely regarded as inadequate and unsafe. When Sconyers named a figure of $2 million, the town-appointed committee instructed its architect to proceed with conceptual drawings. These were presented to the Board of Finance in August. The price tag, including all soft costs, was $2.7 million.

First Selectman Sue Dyer estimates that if the town were to borrow money for the proposed firehouse, the Norfolk taxpayer might see a tax increase of one mill, or $1 per $1000 of property value, as evaluated for tax purposes. The increase might be in place for ten years, or until the bond was repaid.

“If there’s one thing I’m not going to do, it’s raise taxes,” says Michael Sconyers. He is optimistic about the cost savings the town will see if it manages to consolidate its primary school with Colebrook’s. Even in the first year or two, he expects savings on the order of $300,000 from sharing the operating costs of the school building. “And that’s where I see the cost of my firehouse bond coming from. It’s all linked,” says Sconyers.

The cost of a bond issue to retire the pension debt is expected to be comparable to the $100,000 a year the town is paying now for its unfunded defined benefit plan. “It’s really the biggest exposure the town has at this point,” says Karen Sebach, who serves on the Pension Committee, “and hopefully we can get out of it before anything catastrophic happens.”

The Board of Finance approved a motion to “investigate obtaining a pension bond” by unanimous vote.