Year in review: Southold pierces state-mandated tax cap with $62.3M budget

The Southold Town Board unanimously adopted its $62.3 million 2025 budget on Nov. 6, which called for a 7.48% tax levy increase and a 6.94% hike in property taxes.
Southold joined four other East End towns — Riverhead, Shelter Island, East Hampton and Southampton — in piercing the state-mandated 2% cap on annual tax increases this year.
“Most towns are faced with the same dilemma in how to provide services,” Southold Town Supervisor Al Krupski said at the meeting, 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 was the result of 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. It additionally allocated 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 prioritized 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, 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 is funneled back into the fund and can help address unforeseen costs throughout the year.
“We’re able to have that as a safety net when we see these unprecedented [cost] increases,” Mr. Doroski said.
For a Southold property with a taxable assessment of $7,000, a resident will 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.
Inflation is an issue 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.”
Original reporting by Nicole Wagner