Chester Board adds vote on local option tax to Town Meeting warning

By Shawn Cunningham
© 2026 Telegraph Publishing LLC

More than a year after it was originally brought up and after several months of discussion with the public, the Chester Select Board decided at its Jan. 7 meeting to put the question of adding 1 percent to the current sales tax on rooms, meals and alcohol to the voters.

The tax is seen as a way to fund the work of Chester’s Housing Commission in supporting the development of affordable housing in the town.

The board revisited the arguments for and against the sales tax increase and the alternatives for funding the commission, including taking money from the economic development fund that lends to local businesses that are either upgrading or trying to get off the ground. Two new restaurants — Meditrina and Alder Bakery —  have both received such loans. Another possibility was taking money from a fund created when a mining company paid for an option to extract talc from land where the town owns the mineral rights. A third possibility would be to put the estimated amount the tax would generate into the budget which would raise the property tax between one and two cents.

By Wednesday’s meeting, the board had pretty much decided that if the tax were to be instituted, it should have a sunset provision, but had not landed on a time frame.  Five years was proposed, but several members felt that the task of developing housing would probably take more time and suggested 10 years.

Board member Tim Roper said that the rooms/meals/alcohol tax would have the least impact on residents with more coming from visitors. He also spoke of a dividend of housing development which would be an expanded grand list which would help spread out the cost of running the town.

Board chair Lee Gustafson restated his opinion that taxes are not the best way and proposed moving $100,000 from the Cyprus Minerals Fund.

Board member Arianna Knapp said she felt that if the decision were left up to the board, she would prefer to seed the Housing Commission’s work using the Cyprus Minerals Fund.

In the end, the board decided to give the public its say and put an article on the Town Meeting Day warning. The vote was 4-1, with Gustafson voting no. The board will be looking at the article’s language again when it’s scheduled to approve the final warning at its Jan. 21 meeting. As it stands, that article has a 10 year sunset.

In response to a question from Chester resident Judith Yogman, Town Manager Julie Hance confirmed that, like the town budget, the vote on the local option tax would be done from the floor at the meeting on Monday, March 2.

Budget nears completion; 2025 may show a $350,000 deficit

Over the past few months, the board has been going over proposed budgets department by department until last Wednesday, when members looked at the budget as a whole and learned that it would be up 6.5 percent from last year. They also learned that the town expects that the final accounting for 2025 will show a deficit.

Hance said initial indications show a the deficit around $350,000 but said that the books are not closed on the year yet and the exact amount will not be known until the auditors finish their work, which begins in mid-February. Items like ambulance billing from November and December won’t come in until January or February. The total 2025 budget was $5.8 million, which doesn’t include water and sewer, which is paid for by the users and doesn’t affect the General Fund.

Several factors contribute to the overage, Hance told the board. The town is keeping older equipment longer and is over-budget on the repairs to keep them operating. Heating bills are up and the town has needed to get legal help,  leading to lawyers’ fees being high. Hance also said that the revenue from court fees (for traffic tickets) is down because the Police Department was short several officers during a portion of the year.

Hance said that in budgeting as tightly as they do, there’s not a lot of room for price increases in goods and services. She noted that tariffs on goods from Canada that the town uses have also hurt. She also noted that the auditor’s report had come back in the fall and that they were saying that the town had a deficit of $300,000 for the 2024 budget year. Hance said she and the finance staff disagreed with the conclusions the auditors came to and expected to work through the numbers with the auditors on 2024 in February.

Chester resident Derek Suursoo said he was on the select board the last time the town had a financial crunch and it was much worse than this. Suursoo said that by state statute the town has to address a deficit in the year it is discovered.

Suursoo, a perennial budget hawk, said he was not worried about the deficit because the town could pay it in a lump sum or borrow and pay in installments. What he was concerned about was having another deficit going forward.

To deal with shortfalls, the board discussed how to put money into a reserve fund that would take care of shortfalls. Suursoo stressed that such a fund not be used as an source of money for unbudgeted projects. A reserve fund was created by the Town Meeting voters in March 2019, but no funding was approved at that time.

Well into the third hour of a nearly four-hour meeting, the board decided to send any questions they had regarding the budget to Hance so she could have answers for its Jan. 21 meeting.

On Tuesday Jan. 13 Hance told The Telegraph that she would like to begin a conversation about how the town does budgeting with the public. That would include looking at the services the town provides and how they are paid for. She said she would like to do this well ahead of the 2027 budget season and get an idea of which services the public wants and if there are those that they don’t use.

Electronic display signs OK’d with limits

Before its regular meeting, the board held a hearing to look at a proposed amendment to zoning regulations put together by the Planning Commission that would allow “electronic message display” signs to be used by public school and municipal entities in two zoning districts – Village Mixed Use and Neighborhood districts. Here is a current village zoning district map.

Planning Commission chair and Zoning Administrator Hugh Quinn told the board that the commission took up the request from Randy Miles, a member of the Green Mountain High School communications team, which is seeking to help the school better communicate with the community.

Quinn said the commission’s goal of the ordinance was to provide that the school has the ability to communicate information without signage that seem like a Las Vegas strip. He credited commission member Carl Henshaw with researching ordinances of towns with such signs, including Springfield. Board members praised the amendment for being both concise and detailed.

The amendment allows a display sign to be two colors with four lines of text. It may not have animation or flashing or streaming and it must be turned off from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. To read a the full text of the amendment click here.

Because the ordinance covers only two districts, Green Mountain High and the Public Safety Building can have such display signs but Chester-Andover Elementary and Town Hall cannot.