Town Board adopts $62.3M 2025 budget

The Southold Town Board unanimously adopted a $62.3 million 2025 preliminary budget at its regular meeting Wednesday, which calls for a 7.48% tax levy increase and a 6.94% hike in property taxes.

Southold joins the other four East End towns of Riverhead, Shelter Island, East Hampton and Southampton in piercing the state-mandated 2% cap on annual tax increases.

“Most towns are faced with the same dilemma in how to provide services,” Southold Town Supervisor Al Krupski said Wednesday, pointing to expenditures such as road and building repairs, employee salaries and insurance. “Every municipality is in the same boat, struggling to try to figure out how to provide those services to the community.”

The Town Board said the budget increase results in part from rising salaries, insurance costs and retirement contributions for town employees. The increase will also provide roughly $1.9 million for infrastructure improvements for roadways, sidewalks, coastal resiliency, stormwater mitigation and water quality. The budget also allocates funding for streetlights and road resurfacing on Fishers Island. 

“Rest assured that we are taking this under … careful consideration,” councilman Greg Doroski said of the budget hike. “And as a group, [we] went through the budget line by line to figure out where we can make additional cuts and where we had to put some money back.” 

Councilwoman Anne Smith noted that the budget prioritizes health and security in Southold, specifically public safety and infrastructure upgrades, “that would keep the town’s financial systems secure.” 

In addition to a slew of unforeseen fiscal hurdles and infrastructure needs, including unfunded state-mandates to monitor well water near composting sites, Mr. Doroski said the budget also accounts for projects and programs in the preliminary budgets for 2026 and 2027. He said that crafting annual budgets as part of a multi-year process allows the board to put itself in a position to not be at risk of, “going off a fiscal cliff.” 

The multiyear approach also helps maintain a fund balance that acts as a “savings account,” for the town, Mr. Doroski added. Money that is not spent by various town departments throughout the year is funneled back into the fund and can help address unforeseen costs throughout the year. 

“This is something that the state comptroller recommends — I believe their recommendation is 20% of your operating budget,” Mr. Doroski said. “And we’re able to have that as a safety net when we see these unprecedented [cost] increases.”

What does it mean for residents?

The tax levy represents, “the total amount of money that has to be raised from property tax,” to cover the town’s expenses, while the tax rate is calculated by dividing the levy by the, “assessed value of real property” in the municipality, according to the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance. 

For a Southold property with a taxable assessment of 7,000, a resident would see their town taxes increase in 2025 by $170 for a total payment of $2,620, according to an email from Board of Assessors chairman Kevin Webster.

Roughly twenty residents filed into Town Hall Wednesday for the public hearings that state law requires when proposed budgets exceed the 2% tax cap. Several of the speakers were representatives of the local non-profit group, Center for Advocacy, Support and Transformation. 

CAST president Marc Sokol asked the Town Board to consider allocating $75,000 to support the programs and services the organization provides throughout the community. The organization “has never been included in the Southold Town budget” since it was founded in 1968, Mr. Sokol said. CAST received federal funds through the town’s Community Development Block Grant in 2021, 2022 and 2024, but Sokol said the organization is not scheduled to receive them in 2025. 

“In Southold right now, we have a crisis,” Jan Nicholson, of Peconic, said. “One family in seven is a working family that cannot make ends meet and is relying on CAST for help. And CAST has gone from a budget of less than $1 million to about $3 million in a matter of a few years because this crisis has come upon us so suddenly; it’s the cost of food and the cost of energy, and the cost of housing — and the pandemic accelerated this.”

Inflation is an issue that Mr. Krupski and the Town Board said they took into consideration when constructing the budget. While accounting for salary raises for town employees, the board decided not to raise their own salaries in the 2025 budget in an effort to limit the tax levy increase. 

“In the face of these [cost] increases, there is not much we can do,” Mr. Doroski said. “The health insurance costs are out of control, and I think this is something that’s affecting small business, it’s affecting municipalities and it’s affecting regular people.” 

The Suffolk County Legislature unanimously passed its $4 billion budget Wednesday. The county budget will increase general fund taxes by roughly $6 for residents of the five East End towns.