TUPPER LAKE — The Tupper Lake Village Board voted unanimously to adopt its 2026-27 budget, along with an accompanying local law to override the tax cap at its April 20 regular meeting.
The roughly $3.38 million budget marks a 2.02% increase in overall spending from the 2025-26 budget. Its nearly $2.4 million tax levy is about a 5.73% increase from last year. The tax rate per $1,000 of assessed property value rose to about $16.60 from last year’s approximately $15.76. The village states in its budget that it’s a 5.05% increase in the tax rate, calculated by dividing last year’s tax rate by this year’s rate, subtracting one from that figure and multiplying the absolute value of that by 100.
Percentage rate increases, however, are often calculated by subtracting last year’s value ($15.764788) from this year’s value ($16.603877), dividing that figure by the last year’s value and multiplying it by 100. This yields a slightly higher tax rate increase of about 5.32%. The Enterprise has used this equation in previous budget stories. It also appears to be the equation the village used for its spending and levy percentage increases.
Regardless, it’s the rate per $1,000 increase that matters for tax bills. The budget amounts to a 1.66% effective tax rate of one’s real property. Someone who owns property assessed at $300,000 would pay a village tax bill of $4,980 under this year’s budget. It does not take into account town and school taxes. This village-only charge is a $252 increase for that $300,000 assessed property from what would have been paid last year, which was $4,728, or an effective tax rate of about 1.58%.
Mayor Mary Fontana said that while the budgeting process was far from easy, she thought village officials were prudent and dedicated a lot of time reviewing expenditures line-by-line.
“I feel that this board has done incredible work with our department heads and our treasurer to deliver a responsible budget,” she said. “It’s difficult to stomach for the taxpayers who sit up there, the taxpayers in this room and the folks who can’t come to the meeting tonight.”
Fontana added that she and the trustees are always available to hear public comments, and welcome them.
“You don’t have to wait for board meetings to come and address your representatives,” she said. “Our phones, they’re posted on the village website. You can email us anytime. We will answer any question that we possibly can while we have you on the phone or we will get back to you with an answer.”
Downtown businessman Steve Jellie is frequently at odds with Fontana, but felt the village had no alternative around this year’s increase.
“I know we don’t want it to happen, but I don’t think you had any choice,” he said. “Laying people off in the village is just a recipe for disaster. We’ve just got to not be here next year.”
The meeting lasted over an hour-and-a-half, and was largely a town hall style back-and-forth between the public and the board. For many in attendance, the budget’s passage was thought to be a foregone conclusion, whether they agreed with it or not. But the forum was just-as-much an opportunity to raise bigger picture concerns.
DISSOLUTION DISCUSSION
Jellie devoted most of his comments that evening to calling for village dissolution, something he has often spoken about. The argument’s crux remains unchanged from its previous discussions in Tupper Lake for the past decade and beyond: that the town harbors a deeper tax base yet the village provides the bulk of local services, which sometimes directly or indirectly benefit the town.
Tupper Lake’s 2026 tentative tax rolls, which are unofficial, show a total assessed property value of $145,608,012 within the village of Tupper Lake and $481,554,257 within the town of Tupper Lake. The latter includes the village value. When subtracted, this ostensibly leaves $335,866,245 of assessed property value that’s outside of the village and within the town. The equalization rate is reported to be at 57%, meaning the state views these assessments as constituting 57% of their fair market value.
Dissolution proponents contend that these village supplied services benefit the town’s people — if not quite in equal propensity to within the village bounds, then at least significantly enough to warrant a greater contribution on their part. Dissolving the village, proponents contend, would allow that burden to be absorbed by a greater tax base that would be more reflective of services distribution while easing the burden on, what is statistically, a more socioeconomically-strained taxbase within the village than the town overall. Jellie reminded the room that they pay town taxes too, albeit at a lower rate than town-only taxpayers — who still pay a lesser total rate considering there’s no village tax bill and school tax rates are uniform between the town and village.
“That’s your money down there too,” Jellie said of the town hall. “It’s your money they’re spending, and it’s your money that they’re not spending to put these services together. It’s the money that if everybody in the town was paying their share, everybody in the village would pay a lesser share. We wouldn’t all be sitting here figuring out how to do it.”
But strings remain. For instance, the current village debt generally would not transfer over. If dissolution happened, a “legacy district” would likely be created where the current village taxbase solely remains responsible for servicing. There’s also some uncertainty over what would happen to the village electric department’s contract, which supplies cheaper electricity, compared to the state average, through direct purchase from the New York Power Authority that largely avoids private-sector mark-ups.
Fontana felt it would be irresponsible to proceed with dissolution without first having a study that thoroughly evaluates the fiscal ramifications and what a full consolidation of services to the town of Tupper Lake would look like. She said she reached out to the Development Authority of the North Country — a public benefits corporation that contracts with municipalities across the region for its infrastructure management and socioeconomic analysis — for a dissolution study, which it has performed for other northern New York municipalities.
Fontana said DANC told her initially that it did not then have the capacity to do a study. About two months ago, she said her DANC contact, Kari Tremper, replied and said they could now have capacity — at which point Fontana said she submitted an official request but has not yet heard back. The village would still have to create an RFP for its study.
Fontana, who previously served on the town board, noted that it’s been a long-running discussion, but not much has happened. She referenced a town-village joint meeting where audience member Ron LaScala, who was then a village trustee, was present.
“Nothing came of it,” she said. “There was co-terminus, there was dissolution. There was a lot of discussion but then no action.”
LaScala, who at the time tried to rally support for a co-terminus arrangement — where the village bounds expand to share identical boundaries with the town — and now supports dissolution, agreed that nothing became of it, but said that was intentional.
“Nothing came of it because nobody wanted anything to happen,” he said. “Now we’re here at the edge of the cliff where it’s really become unaffordable to be a village property owner.”
LaScala said at the time, he urged Fontana and then-town board member Tracy Luton to support a co-terminus plan as he felt it would have eschewed many of the uncertainties with dissolution. But that would have required the town people’s affirmative support, and it’s unlikely to have succeeded since it was essentially voting for another tax for town-only residents.
While dissolution has some unknowns, LaScala was adamant that job loss would not be one of those, and the need to consolidate now outweighs the potential drawbacks.
“Whether it’s one town or one village, nobody is going to lose their job,” he said. “But we have to get down to one government because we’re at the cliff now.”
Jellie echoed this, arguing that job or benefits losses are boogeymen and was confident these positions and benefits contracts could be absorbed, and would be functionally needed, in one government, given that its responsibilities would perceivably grow.
“This topic has been made about employees for too long,” he said. “This isn’t about employees. There’s not a person standing up there and not a person in their departments who we don’t need, and probably another 20% on top of that to get the job done right. Police department? Probably 50% to get the job done right. This is not about people anymore.”
Fontana told the room she would endeavor to deliver a more comprehensive update on where things stand now at the village board’s regular May 18 meeting.
“I promise you, that is a conversation that this board is going to have in depth,” she said. “I would like to be able to deliver real numbers to the community of what it’s going to cost the village and the town to go to a dissolution.”
GARBAGE CUTS
Perhaps the most palpable of the cuts made to mitigate tax increases this year was the discontinuation of village garbage collection, which will sunset on May 31. Residents with unused stickers can bring those to the village offices for full reimbursement, Fontana noted.
“It was not a decision we made lightly, and we knew it wasn’t going to be popular,” she said.
The cost-benefit analysis, though, made it a strong case for its abolition. Fontana said it was a relatively small customer base for how much it cost the village, and the village’s garbage truck was on its last leg. A replacement was estimated to have cost $80,000, on top of the $10,000 to $13,000 estimated annual savings, Fontana said.
The cut affects one part-time, 9-hour-per-week employee, which Fontana said the village has an opportunity to offer another job with seasonal employment.
“We’ll welcome that application,” she said.
The board’s vote was 4-0. Deputy mayor and village Trustee Eric Shaheen abstained, as his private business, E&M Enterprises, offers some trash-removal services. He was adamant that he was not involved in the discussion to end the service leading up to the April 20 vote.
“I had nothing to do with it,” he said at the meeting. “I was attacked for it last time.”
POLICING
Multiple residents asked about police staffing, and if the hours could be expanded or shifted later from the current 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Village Police Chief Eric Proulx said there’s not enough officers for 24/7 policing, but noted that about “95%” of the night calls State Police handle within the village police’s territory are simply passed on, after the immediate situation is addressed, for TLPD to investigate — which its office spend daytime hours on.
Additionally, Proulx said that while people may think crime increases at night — and while that is true nationally for certain types of violent crime — Tupper Lake tends to see the majority of its incidents during the day. Proulx said that in reviewing reports that occurred in his absence during a recent vacation, there were either six or nine — he forgot off the top of his head which one it was — night calls from State Police that were passed on to TLPD to investigate, compared to 64 daytime calls that TLPD directly responded to. He added that these were incidents where police were called to, as opposed to routine traffic enforcement. This was all to say that the department’s hours match when it is most needed.
Someone noted that there seems to be an uptick in loud illegal four-wheeler riding around 7 p.m. Proulx didn’t disagree, and wished more enforcement could be done, but said that with the current staffing, shifting back later in the evening would compromise more pressing staffing demands at other times of the day.
Trustee Brasen LaVassaur pointed out that if policing hours went later into the evening, the noisy illegal riding would also just move further back as well. Proulx added that he was hopeful of two new recruits coming down the pipeline — which the budget allocates for — and a possible lateral transfer.
Shaheen said in his four years on the village board, retention often boils down to a salary the village cannot meet.
“We have tried and tried to hire,” he said. “The four years I’ve been here, I mean we’ve hired officers and they’ve left because they can leave and start at $100,000 plus at the State Police. We can’t compete with that salary.”