To the Editor:
I am proud to announce that I handed in my Tentative Budget for 2026 to Town Clerk Linda Zappala on Sept. 30 and it is officially UNDER the tax cap!
The Tentative Budget is crafted by the Budget Officer (me) in consultation with Accounting Department and using budget request info from all town officials and departments. My budget will ultimately be passed or changed by the rest of the Town Board by mid-November.
I know affordability is on everyone’s minds. We are under the tax cap this year, meaning the budget growth is less than what New York State would recommend as the “maximum” budget increase. This is opposed to last year’s budget that was certainly a rip off the band-aid budget with all the contractual increases and left-over fund-balance issues we were facing as well as the investment in our new life-saving ambulance service. But as promised, we are back on track fiscally, keeping increases as low as possible, but still making investments in the community. Town of Chester residents can expect a slight increase, depending on their specific assessments and special districts that they live in, but nothing compared to last year’s increase. Village of Chester residents can expect a slight decrease in their taxes.
To put things in perspective, since 2018, the Town of Chester has exceeded the tax cap four times - in 2020, 2021, 2024, and 2025. It also never reduced taxes overall in any of those last eight years. It is an achievement to stay under the tax cap with all the rising costs of society, healthcare, contractual obligations, regular raises for our town employees, major asset investments, and more. In addition to all of this, revenues from sales tax and mortgage tax were less than anticipated across Orange County. With all of this in mind, I decided to eliminate approximately $224,354 from what was originally requested by our various town department heads in their official 2026 budget requests. This brought us within a 2-3% growth in the budget, thus staying under our calculated tax cap.
To combat these issues long-term, I advocated for, and the Town Board passed, the new Hotel/Motel/Airbnb Tax which will bring in additional revenues from visitors to Chester. The Town Comptroller and I brought forward new investment opportunities from NYCLASS, which the Town Board accepted. We are already collecting more in interest from that decision. The Town Board voted to sell the Sugar Loaf Performing Arts Center, which saved us from a permanently escalating budget item and staffing costs. The loss of the building is going to allow us to stay within healthy budget growth as predicted. Finally, the Town Board accepted a new utility contract with fixed energy price rates for the next five years which will help stabilize costs further in a world with increasingly volatile energy rates.
I will explain everything else in detail at my budget presentation sometime in the next week or two, so be on the lookout for an announcement on that as well as the annual budget workshops. If anyone has any questions, please feel free to reach out to me anytime.
Brandon Holdridge
Chester Town Supervisor