The 2025 budget shows our focus at delivering high quality services Hamiltonians expect while doing it at a cost-efficient price. For three of the last four years, Hamilton has been able to hold the line on taxes during a high-inflation environment, but unfortunately, the 2025 budget does contain an increase. For the average homeowner, it comes to an increase of less than $3/week.
Since the 2020 budget, inflation has increased by more than 21%. We all have experienced this as we go grocery shopping, buy a car or through increased insurance costs. Just like all of you, the Township government is subject to these costs, and others, that have caused us to drill down even harder on costs.
To put this in perspective, the last time inflation was this high over a 3-year period, Ronald Reagan was in his first term as President! This made this budget an extremely difficult one to manage but we believe we have struck the right balance so we can continue to keep Hamilton America’s favorite hometown!
Our 2025 budget increase is driven almost entirely by health insurance costs with an increase of 30 percent. To put into perspective our entire budget, the costs of funding the police department, fire department along with their pensions costs plus overall health insurance are 50 percent of our overall budget.
While the non-discretionary cost increases drove nearly all of the budget increase, we were still able to keep our services all of us need. Besides the police and fire protection mentioned above, we continue to invest in our infrastructure with repaving streets, fund our health department as we fend off a measles outbreak, keep our animals in the shelter taken care of and fund our Township annual events.
We are hopeful that inflation cools in the near future and we no longer face these significant increases on non-discretionary items.