‘No frills’ budget in Bourne is up for a vote May 1. So is repealing a cannabis ban.

BOURNE – Town Administrator Marlene McCollem has crafted a structurally-balanced and level-serviced $77.2 million spending plan for fiscal 2024, pivoting on “practical” requests of department heads.

The budget is up 3.5% from this past year.

The May 1 annual town meeting, with 22 articles, is all about budget numbers and associated financing. There is no borrowing for capital requests. No reliance on the free cash account for budget balancing. No staffing increases.

There are contractual increases, however, along with a few job reclassifications. There is the possibility that more body camera data managers will be needed in the police department; possibly in fiscal 2025, McCollem told the Finance Committee in early April.

The landfill budget ($13.8 million) and the sewer division spending plan ($1.6 million), meanwhile, are carried separately in enterprise fund accounting.

“We can deal with ongoing costs with ongoing revenue,” McCollem advised the Select Board. “We will limit borrowing until it is really needed. We’re in good fiscal shape. We’ll be able to maintain long-term flexibility and not rely (in June) on fiscal turn-backs. So, we’re in a position to respond well when conditions change.”

Select Board Chair Peter Meier agreed.

“This is a no-frills budget,” he said March 31. “It will provide a level of service the community wants. It touches all the bases; public safety, public works, education, the elderly.”

When and where is Bourne's annual town meeting?

The annual town meeting starts at 7 p.m. at Bourne High School. The special session convenes at 7:30 p.m. Digital voting will be in effect. Both warrants are on the town website along with the voter handbook.

School budgets are up, despite staff reductions in Bourne Public Schools.

McCollem and Finance Director Erica Flemming in March wrestled with a $162,000 shortfall caused by rising Upper Cape Cod Regional Technical School enrollment and an increased assessment as well as a $55,000 reduction in local aid from Beacon Hill.

The hike is resolved via a reduction in the group health insurance account. The school charge next year totals $3.3 million.

The Bourne Public Schools budget is level-serviced with some staff reductions, totaling an overall $25.9 million. This is up 3.53% with $4.6 million in offsets. Teaching salaries total $16 million.

There is a $50,000 school department request to hire an owner’s project manager, who would ride herd on plans to ultimately remove solar panels from the middle school and repair the badly leaking roof.

Reserves will fund big-ticket purchases, including five police cruisers, body cameras and boat ramp upgrades.

Capital Outlay Committee Chair Donald Pickard said that budget totals $3.5 million. The biggest investments are: landfill ($1,015,650), police ($873,000), facilities ($580,000) and schools ($310,000).

The capital list includes five police cruisers, 48 body cameras and 10 cruiser ‘cams,’ emergency repairs to private roads, boat ramp upgrades, as well as $20,368 to study the feasibility of reconstructing the Great Cedar Swamp boardwalk at Waterhouse Road.

Capital spending also includes a highway packer and sander/plow, a town hall fire alarm and air handler system, a custodial vehicle and Natural Resources truck as well as landfill equipment needs.

Voters could reverse the Bourne ban on recreational cannabis sales.

The special town meeting includes two tent-pole articles to reverse the town ban on recreational cannabis sales and pass a bylaw to govern pot dispensaries.

The articles could serve as a meeting showstopper and straddle a generational fault line if past town meetings are an indication. Article 7 involves a repeal of the general bylaw ban on the sale of recreational marijuana. If this prevails, voters will next review a zoning bylaw to accommodate pot sales (Article 8).

Article 7 will be considered first. Both are citizen petition requests. The repeal proposal was submitted by real estate agent Steve Strojny and merchant Kevin Hough. The repeal entails a simple majority vote. A new bylaw needs a two-thirds majority to prevail.

The Finance Committee on April 3 voted 6-3 to take no action on the proposed repeal. The board’s recommendation for bylaw warrant placement came April 24 with a 7-1 vote.

Bourne town meeting voters have been asked about recreational marijuana sales before.

The May 1 town meeting represents the third time voters have decided recreational marijuana sales.

First, the sales were approved. Then in a second 2018 meeting, that decision was overturned in a late-night vote.

Four of five Select Board members publicly support the latest cannabis articles. But in late March, they stopped short of officially recommending them.

Meier, in a March 31 interview, envisioned two pot dispensaries; one on each side of the canal, possibly along State Road in North Sagamore and Route 28 in Monument Beach.

“This is a heavily regulated industry,” Strojny told the Select Board on March 28. “It’s an industry that would do well in town.”

Strojny recommends three dispensaries. With zoning bylaw expertise from his former Planning Board tenure, he said the articles are timely and well-conceived. He also said recreational dispensaries operate safely and securely in Carver, Wareham, Sandwich and Falmouth and provide jobs, while Bourne misses out on associated tax and community impact fee revenue.

"The numbers are meaningful," Strojny told the Planning Board on April 13. “They’re not play numbers. They’re real numbers. And the $4 billion industry is maturing now. And the people who are in it know what they’re doing.”

Are recreational pot sales a community game changer?

Strojny also said Bourne’s anti-pot sentiment has changed since 2018 debate. Select Board members did not challenge that point.

“People in the industry know what they’re doing,” Strojny reiterated with the Planning Board on April 13. Members then voted 9-0 to procedurally advance the bylaw article to the special town meeting.  But they reserved concerns about a marijuana cultivation operation being situated in downtown Buzzards Bay’s growth incentive zone.

Meier doubts community headwinds await the pot requests. He equates the business model of cannabis dispensaries with package stores.

“If you have no desire for alcohol, you just drive on by,” he said. “Same with recreational cannabis.”

The Bylaw Committee on April 19 supported the requests as suitable for warrant placement. Strojny told the committee members that pot tax revenue could help the town hire municipal employees.

Voters in the October 2018 special town meeting voted 415-321 to reject commercial pot sales.

Will voters decide to move the historic Keene House or fund a feasibility study into the library?

Voters will also consider a $250,000 Community Preservation Act request to move the privately-owned and historically significant Keene House from Bourne village to the Aptucxet Museums campus. The ‘Plan B’ site is town-owned land next to the Briggs-McDermott campus at Sandwich Road.

There is also a $45,000 preservation act request to move the former Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce information booth from the Cumberland Farms property off the Bourne Rotary to the Aptucxet VFW Post at Shore Road.

Voters will also review a $150,000 request for a feasibility study into the future of the town library at Sandwich Road.

“We don’t know what the library should be in the next 70 years,” McCollem told the Select Board in January. “We need to have a conversation about that. In many ways the library is reaching the end of its life in its systems and weather-proofing and maybe not meeting the community’s needs given space in the building.”

The Finance Committee will not present articles to voters or try to explain them.

There is a new procedural town meeting wrinkle. The Finance Committee will not present articles to voters, try to explain them or advance inquiry. This is not the panel’s job, committee Chair Renee Gratis told the Select Board on March 28.

Gratis wants to break with tradition. She said her board’s role as currently defined is “unfair” especially when discussion cascades into difficult article explanations. She said members may offer thoughts about an article’s merit but not delve into expert explanations of what is sought.

Change aside, Moderator Amy Kullar is committed to keeping town meeting moving along.

Meier, meanwhile, said his board may revisit town meeting procedures this summer and possibly support a return to traditional presentations by the Finance Committee.

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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Bourne Town Meeting: Police body cams, cannabis shops, school finances