Upcoming panel set for changes to Mount Desert’s recycling program.
Feb 06, 2026
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Edward Jones Financial Advisor: Elise N. Frank.
MOUNT DESERT—The town’s new Finance Director Nancy Parsons and new Town Manager Alex Kimball said Monday that though the town is going to use a bit of its fund balance to cover budget deficits, this cannot become practice.
“The reason that I wanted to bring this to your attention is that I understand it’s part of the regular budget process here to plan to use fund balance to cover any deficit in the budget for the year—something that you vote on at your town meeting. It’s been done for at least the last few years that I’ve looked at,” Parsons said during the February 2 meeting. “Every year the general fund has done very well and you haven’t had to actually use that fund balance up until this year.”
“Why is it happening this year?” Martha Dudman, a selectboard member, asked.
“I’ve got that one,” Kimball said. “The budget for this year had two sort of fundamental issues that need addressing. One is the simple fact that we budgeted to use $600,000. So one could look at this to say well we’re only going to use $287,000 worth of budget fund balance versus budgeting $600,000, but at the end of the day, that’s still dipping into the savings account and that can’t go on forever. That’s not a sustainable move. The other part, and this comes back to the discussions we’ve had about a lot of the budgets, where particularly when we looked at a number of the line items for health insurance, retirement, those were showing up as a little under budgeted and that’s biting us a little bit this year. So those two factors are the things that are resulting in this. This is not horrifically off by any stretch, but it does need to not continue.”
A fund balance, Parsons told the board, is the difference between the revenues the town has brought in and the expenses it’s had for the year. When it’s used, she explained, it’s like taking money out of the town’s savings account.
The town of Rochester, New Hampshire explains it as “a measure of equity between revenues and expenditures.”
Just over $287,000 will likely be used of the $600,000 of the town’s fund balance, which has previously been approved to be used by voters.
Parsons said, “You can use it if you absolutely need to but it’s a very dangerous precedent, as a lot of towns in Maine have found out, to start dipping into that and planning to use it on a regular basis.”
The balance is meant to mitigate risk.
“Every government entity requires some level of fund balance for cash flow purposes and for responses to emergencies,” the Town of Rochester explains.
“Until now, we’ve been able to avoid (that). We don’t want to make a habit out of it,” Kimball said.
Selectboard Chair John Macauley said, “I’m sure that people voting on this think, ‘Oh, it’s a chunk of money that’s extra that we made on the market and that’s great, it’ll bring my taxes down. It clearly is not. It clearly is in case we need it.”
The town will rephrase how the fund balance is explained at town meetings and Parsons will give quarterly financial reports in the future.
RECYCLING DISCUSSION
The Town of Mount Desert is changing the way it handles recycling. Join Public Works Director Brian Henkel and Michael Carroll, Executive Director of Municipal Waster Hub, to learn and ask questions about the new system. Register at nehlibrary.org.
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