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Greenport Village Board adopts budget; tax rate lowered again

It didn’t get a lot of attention, but the Greenport Village budget will reduce the tax rate in the village for the fourth consecutive year.

The Village Board unanimously adopted the budget without comment last Thursday night.

The vote followed an April 10 public hearing on the budget at which nobody spoke.

The amount of taxes to be raised in the 2018-19 budget is $989,100, the same as in the current year. A slightly higher assessed value village-wide is what caused the tax rate to drop by a half-percent, according to Mayor George Hubbard Jr.

For someone with property assessed at $4,500, which equates to a market value of about $416,000, the decrease amounts to about $5.

“It’s pretty much status quo,” the mayor said of the budget last month.

Overall spending in the village rose by 7/10ths of a percent, from $10,167,708 to $10,242,882, but most of that is electric, water and sewer fund expenses that are funded mostly by ratepayer fees and not taxes.

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