Supervisor sidelines Rollins’ request for secretary
by Robert Lynch; September 11, 2025
Enfield Supervisor Stephanie Redmond took the wraps off her Town’s Tentative Budget Wednesday night with these words, “It remains very high.”
Very high, perhaps, but it could have been higher. The three-term Supervisor, currently in (uncontested) pursuit of term number four, presented her spending recommendations to the Enfield Town Board that September 10th night. But although the law didn’t require that she do so, Redmond also shared with Board members a second budget compilation, one based on recommendations she’d received from departmental leaders, particularly from Enfield Highway Superintendent Barry “Buddy” Rollins.
Redmond’s “2026 Tentative Budget,” the Town Board’s official budgetary starting point, would raise next year’s property tax levy by 7.32 percent. Highway Fund allocations would contribute 6.07 percent of the averaged increase in the levy; General Fund expenses 10.35 percent.
In terms of appropriations, what the Supervisor recommended would spend $2,605,859, a total up $106,587 or 4.26 percent from the budget adopted for 2025.
The alternative “Requested Budget,” essentially a planning document that carries no official weight, would have raised the overall tax levy far more, by a combined 19.68 percent. Under that alternative, tax levy increases for the Highway Fund would have climbed by 14.36 percent and for the General Fund by a whopping 32.64 percent.
Notable within the General Fund calculations, the “Requested Budget” would have granted Highway Superintendent Rollins’ long-standing request—though intensified this year—to add to his staff a “part-time administrative assistant/clerk” to aid him with his day-to-day paperwork.
Redmond’s recommended budget deleted the secretarial position, thereby saving the Town an otherwise-budgeted $26,000. The Supervisor offered no comment on the deleted request at Wednesday’s Town Board meeting. Highway Superintendent Rollins did not attend the session.
With neither Rollins nor Town Bookkeeper Blixy Taetzsch in the room Wednesday night, Redmond and Town Board members spent relatively little time on the budget, about 20 minutes. They deferred any careful scrutiny or major revisions until a special budget meeting scheduled for one week later, September 17.
Wednesday’s postponement stands in contrast with last year’s hurried budget review, a process in which much of the fiscal slicing and dicing was completed on the night Redmond had first released her proposal,. That night’s busywork—and frictions—led to a 2025 budget that underwent very little change later before it was finally adopted.
That earlier 2025 Town of Enfield Budget, adopted by the Town Board one year ago, raised the property tax by 6.12 percent.
In a departure from the common practice of her predecessor, former Supervisor Beth Magee, Enfield Supervisor Stephanie Redmond does not customarily accompany her Tentative Budget with a written narrative. Nor did she do so this time.
But in an email message to Town Board members September 8, one appended to the budget drafts, Redmond commented: “As you can see I’ve already took (sic) the liberty of making some of the painful decisions to cut things back.”
The Supervisor continued, “Clearly we will need to discuss how to cut this further.”
Those further budget cuts, should they occur, would likely come at the September 17 meeting, or at meetings thereafter.
Additional items requested in the budget planning process—most of them by Rollins—requests not included among the items recommended by Redmond included:
- Construction of a “cold storage facility,” essentially an unheated barn to store equipment at the Highway Department, a likely mid-six-figure investment;
- An equipment wash bay at the Highway Department;
- Blacktopping the Highway Department yard and driveway;
- Similar paving in front of the Town Hall and its driveway, as well as perhaps driveway paving north of the Enfield Courthouse; and
- Construction of a storage building for the recently-purchased Highway Department generator.
Town Justice Heather Knutsen-King had also requested a heftier raise than Supervisor Redmond has recommended. Knutsen-King and her court clerk each currently earn $16,000 annually. The Justice asked that pay for each position elevate to $18,000, a 12.5 percent increase. The Supervisor instead held each of those raises to three percent (to $16,480), a percentage in line with those for most other elected Enfield officials.
Redmond’s recommended budget would raise salaries in 2026 for herself, for the Town Councilpersons, for the Deputy Supervisor, for the Town Clerk/Tax Collector Mary Cornell, and for Highway Superintendent Rollins. Pay for each would rise by three percent.
The Tentative ’26 Budget would elevate the Supervisor’s pay to $27,865. Councilpersons would earn just over $4,000. Clerk Cornell’s combined pay would rise to $41,200. Highway Superintendent Rollins would earn $85,274, his raised from this year’s $82,790.
Highway Superintendent’s pay had proven a hot-button topic in budget discussions last year.
In September 2024, Redmond had initially recommended five percent pay raises for both Rollins and for his Highway Department work staff. During that first night of testy budget deliberations, Rollins had successfully negotiated higher, ten percent raises for himself and for his staff. Rollins promised the Town extra services in return.
The double-digit increase, especially for Rollins, drew criticism last September. It drove this Councilperson, Robert Lynch, to later vote against the entire budget.
So far, neither the Highway Superintendent nor anyone else—other than the Town Justice—has complained about the size of this year’s proposed raises. But outside of the elected class, a few stand to benefit more than do others. To that point, Rollins’ subordinates in the Highway Department would each receive raises of five percent under the Supervisor’s Tentative Budget.
Questioned about whether Superintendent Rollins was comfortable with the pay raise differential between himself and his men—he’d objected to such disparate treatment as recently as last year—Redmond reported that Rollins was satisfied. In fact, the Supervisor claimed it was Rollins, himself, who had proposed the three percent/ five percent difference.
Budgeting for health care coverage, however, could worsen the budget numbers once the Town Board revisits the tentative spending plan next week.
The Greater Tompkins County Municipal Health Insurance Consortium (GTCMHIC) has proposed and will likely adopt later this month 18 percent increases in its premiums. The GTCMHIC provides health insurance coverage for Rollins and for each of his staff. Redmond said she’d included only about an 11 percent premium increase when she drew up her Tentative Budget.
“That’s a bummer,” Redmond said, when she learned of the planned, higher GTCMHIC rate hike.
Aside from the health insurance premiums, what’s driving the projected Enfield tax levy upward this year is not just inflation; its also predicted reductions in revenues apart from the property tax.
The Supervisor’s proposal would drop anticipated Justice Court fines and forfeitures from this year’s budgeted $12,000 to only $5,000. Redmond explained that the $7,000 cut reflects not that people are necessarily behaving themselves better, but rather it represents a downward adjustment arising from the correction of prior errors and omissions. It’s predicted the Town will only receive $5,000 in fines this current year.
Expected mortgage tax receipts will also fall; down from $45,000 budgeted for 2025 to just $35,000 for 2026, better in line with those receipts expected to come in for the current 12 months.
“We are not getting what we’d planned on getting,” Redmond told the Town Board regarding mortgage tax.
Once again this year, the Supervisor’s budget would draw down Enfield’s bank account a bit—its fund balance—to underwrite day-to-day operations. The 2026 budget would tap $100,000 in fund balance, some of the savings derived from a nearly six-figure building permit fee paid when Applegate Road’s Norbut Solar Farm got built. For its 2025 budget, the Town skimmed off a larger amount, $125,000, from the Norbut-fattened fund balance.
“We did allocate quite a lot of fund balance,” Redmond conceded Wednesday as to the latest-proposed six-figure draw.
The Supervisor’s strategy has always been to rely upon the Norbut money little-by-little until the Enfield Highway Garage bonds are fully repaid next year. Highway garage bonding this upcoming, final year, 2026, will be just over $102,000.
But the contrary opinion advanced by this Councilperson, Lynch, is that new bonding will later be needed for something else. An undetermined amount would be required, it’s argued, to build the Highway Department cold storage building that Superintendent Rollins wants. This writer maintains that the structure stands as a priority to protect Enfield’s increasingly sophisticated machinery from the rain and the snow.
Redmond said Wednesday she’d only support the cold storage building’s construction were the Town to find grant money to cover a large portion of its cost, ideally half.
Current figures would place the 2026 Tentative Budget’s property tax increase well above the 3.26 percent ceiling that New York State calculates as this year “tax cap.”
The tax cap, though a persuasive metric to encourage municipal frugality, has become more of a symbolic benchmark in recent years. Towns pay no penalty should their budgets exceed the cap. Taxpayers reap no benefit should a budget comply with it. At its August meeting, the Enfield Town Board voted to override the tax cap.
But if the Enfield Town Board were to set its own ideal taxing limit, what should it be? Town Board members pondered that question Wednesday night.
This Councilperson, Lynch, said he’d be satisfied with the four and one-half percent levy hike. It would match what Tompkins County’s Administration has most recently proposed for next year’s County Budget.
“I think the target should be zero,” Supervisor Redmond advanced, speaking if only partly in jest. “I’d like two percent” the Supervisor then posited, perhaps more realistically.
The Enfield Town Board has scheduled its budget refinement for meetings on September 17, October 8, and if necessary, October 15. Current plans call for a Public Hearing on the budget October 29.
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