Milton officials get good grades in financial report

A year after town officials bit the bullet and passed a 30% property tax increase, Milton’s financial advisor said the town is in much better shape in the short term and can begin looking for ways to increase its reserve and capital improvement planning funds. 

Vieen Leung of consultants PFM Group Consulting said the town’s financial position is much improved from where it was a year ago. In PFM’s report in 2024, the consultants showed the town’s expenses were set to outpace revenues, due to the town not raising property taxes for several years and filling gaps in the budget with reserve funds. 

Tax increases fiscal years 2023 and 2024 were able to help the town maintain services, but the recommendations from PFM and town staff for fiscal year 2025 were to bite the bullet and do a large increase that would enable the town to wean itself off using reserve funds and transfer tax revenues to balance the budget, and to enable smaller, more incremental increases going forward. 

Heading into budget season for fiscal year 2026, which starts in July, Leung said while the town has made tremendous progress in just a year, more work can be done to improve the town’s financial sustainability. 

The first bit of work is to adopt a plan to bulk up the budget reserve funds. Leung said one way the town can do that is to devote a minimum of 25% of its revenues to reserve funds, with the goal of upping that to 35% to 50% over time. She said the town is already devoting a portion of its budget to reserves, so this would be formalizing something the town is already doing. The goal is to create policy that will keep the town from overusing reserve funds to balance the budget. Leung said the town could also create a second reserve fund made up of revenues raised by the Granary at Draper Farm special development district. 

Another goal, Leung said, is to create policy for capital improvement funding. She said the town’s most prominent capital needs are its buildings.

“Every day that you don’t spend a dollar investing in your buildings [is a] day the cost of maintenance goes up,” Leung said. 

Among the needs for the town are a new public works facility and a new police building. The town has already taken steps to address those things, seeking federal funding for a new public works building on Sam Lucas Road and purchasing a 2-acre tract of land between Magnolia and Broad streets for a new police building. Leung said the town should develop a facility plan for upgrading its buildings and continuing to devote realty transfer tax revenue toward capital improvements. 

Ultimately, Leung reiterated the town has made a lot of progress and that PFM will continue working with the town during the FY 2026 budget cycle.

“It’s been a great pleasure to see the remarkable change you have made,” she said. “I know that required a lot of hard decisions.”