The Scarborough Town Council approved 5-2 an $85.6 million town and school budget last week, sending the school’s $56.1 million portion to a validation vote on June 11.

The 4.2% budget increase would result in about a 1.5% tax increase, not including the impact of the town-wide revaluation. Revaluation notices will be mailed to property owners by the end of the month, and the average homeowner is expected to see an additional 4.75% then, according to the town assessor. Roughly 1,800 households who were enrolled in a now defunct state tax stabilization program that cut their property taxes 4% will now have to make up for those lost savings along with tax increases from the budget and the revaluation.

The council and the finance committee pared back the $3.3 million in total cuts it had earlier requested. Those cuts, along with the use of the fund balance, would have resulted in a 0.3% tax increase. The council voted 5-2 against tapping into the fund balance.

“Initially we had asked for the town to offer an $800,000 reduction and the school to try and find a $1.2 million reduction,” Councilor Jon Anderson, chair of the Finance Committee, said at the May 15 meeting. The town got to roughly $1 million, and the schools proposed $1.1 million, in cuts. The council then asked for an additional $400,000 from the town and $800,000 from the schools.

“The intent wasn’t to necessarily have those adjustments, it was really to understand what it would look like,” Anderson said.

The Board of Education and Finance Committee believed an additional $800,000 in cuts went too far and proposed cutting roughly $300,000 instead, bringing their total cuts to $1.4 million.

Councilors Karin Shupe and Don Hamill voted against the budget on May 15. Shupe said cuts to the school’s portion of the budget were excessive and that she would not support the $300,000 in additional cuts.

“I would say more than 80% of the emails I’ve received have been from residents who said, ‘Please do not touch the school budget,'” Shupe said ahead of the vote. “They came out and made their $1.1 million reductions and I was willing to support that, I do not support what’s being proposed right now.”

Hamill said the final cuts did not go far enough.

“In order for me to support a budget like this, and I’ve said this consistently, I think this is a year we should have been flat,” he said.

Councilor Don Cushing, a finance committee member, spoke in favor of the final proposal.

“In the back of my mind on the school side was, ‘Do I really believe that the changes that we are asking for are going to impact the quality of education?'” Cushing said. “As we got into it, I was persuaded that some of them might, so I was willing to moderate my position to (roughly) half that ($800,000) number and get to where we are now.”