WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Finance Committee on Thursday looked at a bleak fiscal forecast for the town and heard from a Planning Board member who is working on a plan that could help to partly reverse the trend.

 

Town Manager Robert Menicocci and Finance Director David Fierro Jr. showed the panel a chart projecting a possible course for town finances based on the current trend line.

 

The bottom line is that the town's excess levy capacity — the sum that it could raise through taxation without a Proposition 2 1/2 override vote — would disappear in 10 years.

 

In other words, if current trends for municipal spending and revenue continue, the town could face a Prop 2 1/2 override vote as early as fiscal year 2036, Fierro told the committee.

 

"We have a very strong financial position," Menicocci said, referring to the town's current state. "We're going to figure out strategies for how to maintain that. But, all things being equal, if we aren't successful, we'll get to a point where we run out of any excess capacity and we get to the point many, many, many communities are in.

 

"It is amazing that virtually all communities are up against their [Proposition 2 1/2] cap. It was something like 90 percent of the communities. It was shocking."

 

Menicocci said the chart the Town Hall staff shared this fall (see below) with the Fin Comm and the Select Board is based on "fairly conservative" estimates of revenue growth. The committee's members have long been sounding the alarm about a trend of declining growth in the tax base that has put all the burden of rising municipal expenses on current property owners.

 

And Menicocci cautioned that 10-year projections do not represent inevitabilities.

 

"There are a lot of assumptions built in," Menicocci said. "Especially with a 10-year look, if we're wrong about something in Year 1, there's a compounding effect.

 

"But the illustration is still important. Just don't treat it as an absolute."

 

Fin Comm Chair Fred Puddester noted that while the revenue estimates embedded in the chart (including $200,000 in "new growth" in the tax base per year) are "conservative," the expense estimates border on austerity.

 

"I can't conceive, with 70 to 75 percent of our budget being personnel … any way we can live with 3.7 percent [budget increases]," Puddester said. "I would put 3.7 as an almost starvation budget. At 4.5 percent, you're probably talking maintenance. This [projection] has no Hoosac River [erosion mitigation]. This doesn't even have debt service for the McCann Tech project.

 

"There's no Town Hall. There's no library."

 

Fin Comm member Suzanne Stinson said the 3.7 percent increase in town spending for each of the next 10 years portrayed a town that was "treading water."

 

"This chart, which has a starvation budget, has the average tax bill going up, what, 70 percent [over 10 years]?" Puddester said. "And it went up 45 percent the 10 years before that. … I don't think we want a starvation budget. We want to support our schools.

 

"It's untenable."

 

It becomes somewhat more tenable if the town sees an increase in economic development and growth in the property tax base, neither of which have been seen in abundance in recent years.

 

The current estimate for new growth for the fiscal year that ends June 30, 2026, is $211,131, less than .02 percent of the $1.5 billion in total taxable property in town in FY25. That is why Fierro plugged in the "conservative" estimate of $200,000 in new growth for each year going forward on the table he showed the Fin Comm.

 

Cory Campbell and his colleagues on the Planning Board hope that a change to the zoning bylaw could spur developers to create new taxable property in the town's business zones.

 

Campbell was before the Finance Committee on Wednesday to update the body on an initiative he is leading to amend the bylaw to allow more "mixed-use" development in the Limited Business and Planned Business zones.

 

The Planning Board is studying how to change the rules in those districts — or at least some parts of the non-contiguous areas that are zoned with those designations — to allow the creation of 21st century office space, housing and retail or commercial properties.

 

"I focused on these business areas, knowing that there has been a history of people putting a proposal forward that would get shot down at town meeting, particularly because of how it would affect existing residential areas," Campbell said. "If you can build more residential in these business zones without sacrificing the business purpose of the zones themselves — not diminishing the economic vitality or even increasing it, that seemed like something to pursue.

 

"The only way I could see, right off the bat, was building up, along with reducing some other what might be perceived as restrictions or requirements in order to incentivize."

 

Campbell noted the bylaw as currently written allows for residential space above a business use in the zones he is targeting. And a residential-only building could be built in the zones tomorrow. But he said the current bylaw is ambiguous and creates uncertainty for potential developers.

 

Campbell said the proposal he is envisioning would incorporate "form-based" zoning, a departure from traditional zoning that is designed around the uses of property.

 

"With form-based approaches … if you have a vision of what you want someplace to be in the future, can you define that and, hopefully, have people build toward that future?" Campbell said.

 

"You can make a form-based code anything you really want it to be. The bylaws that Williamstown currently has have traditionally been zone-based, so very rigidly defined and separated."

 

Campbell said he currently was not proposing a form-based approach to any areas other than the Limited Business and Planned Business zones but said, "everything is on the table."

 

The Planning Board is not close to preparing a draft bylaw amendment in time for the May 2026 annual town meeting. Part of the reason for Campbell's appearance at the Fin Comm on Wednesday was to include other town entities in the discussion before a full-fledged bylaw proposal is ready to present to the full town. He said he hopes to give a similar presentation to the Select Board in the coming weeks.

 

Another reason he was before the Fin Comm was to start a conversation about forming a working group that includes Finance Committee and Select Board members, and perhaps other people, with himself and Planning Board member Samantha Page, the board members tasked with researching the bylaw change.

 

The committee members were supportive of Campbell's efforts and suggested that he reach out to both local developers and local business lenders for their input about what sorts of changes to the bylaw might generate interest from investors. Puddester also suggested reaching out to Williams College, which he said signed a five-year lease for 25 percent of the Cable Mills apartments that helped make that development economically viable.

 

No zoning change, of course, will, by itself, create new development. The hope is that by allowing the opportunity for development, town meeting could create an environment where the tax base could grow.

 

"To move new growth, which is what [the Fin Comm] focuses a lot of time on — $15 million is a 1 percent addition to the tax base," Melissa Cragg noted. "So, something like this, even one or two of these [mixed-use developments] actually moves the needle. You can imagine one $15 million project or two $7.5 million projects as opposed to 15 million-dollar homes. That's the way I think about it."

 

Puddester agreed.

 

"If you can think about developing one of these areas — if you fully develop Williamstown Plaza [a Main Street property in the Planned Business district], that would be worth three Cable Mills in one year," Puddester said. "You look at these redevelopment projects, without removing a tree or a blade of grass in town, because we don't want to do that, it really makes a difference."

 

In other business on Wednesday, the Finance Committee learned from Menicocci that the FY27 budget likely will include slightly less support for nonprofits than the town has provided in the past.

 

Menicocci, who moved those supports into the appropriated budget last year, said it still makes sense to give financial help to the Williamstown Youth Center, which provides services that help the community and the town's bottom line. And he said he is having conversations with the Williamstown Community Preschool about "options" to support that entity, which, like the WYC, used to receive support in the form of allocations from free cash that were widely supported at town meeting.

 

The Williamstown Chamber of Commerce, on the other hand, is in line to receive less than it historically has been allotted because some of the work done by the Chamber is now handled in-house at Town Hall.

 

"You may remember we added a little bit of additional money on the town's side [in the FY26 budget] to have a half-time communications staff person in place," Menicocci said. "That person has been on board for almost a quarter [of the year], Laura Christensen. She's known to many for her work on Destination Williamstown. There's fortunate synergy there where what we're doing around lack of support for travel and tourism, we're starting to step into that arena.

 

"So we're pulling back some of the funding we'd given the chamber in the past to support the work that happened on that front. We're finding more efficiencies in terms of the uses of technology as we're doing more work to build up our communications. What that will lead to is a smaller footprint for the chamber where we ask them to very specifically support some of the town activities we have folks come together for, generally around the holidays and such."

 

The Chamber of Commerce has been the lead agency both for Holiday Walk and the town's July 4 festivities; last year, it added Pride Month celebrations in June to that roster of events.

 

In answer to questions from Cragg, Menicocci said that he had buy-in from the chamber about transitioning the tourism and promotion activities to town hall and, thus, reducing the chamber's role and taxpayer support.

 

As for other non-profits, like Remedy Hall and the Williamstown Farmers Market, which made overtures to the town last year, Menicocci signaled that the FY27 budget he presents to the Fin Comm this winter for review will not include anything beyond the youth center, preschool and chamber.

 

"Going forward, it's important for folks to realize there will be financial pressures," he said. "In  the past we've entertained folks coming in and requesting money. It's going to be a very tough year to do that. Some folks have reached out, and I'll be having conversations with them.

 

"Between inflation and health care and, generally, education, we can't keep pace with that. That, to me, is a non-starter out of the gates of entertaining other things. We've got to balance our budget first. That's what we're going to focus our energies on for the near term. We're hopeful that we've got everybody's support on that."