TIVERTON — The budget season is still young but Town Council members want both taxpayers and Budget Committee to know that the numbers look grim and a tax hike may be unavoidable.

Days before a joint meeting with the schools and Budget Committee, council members voiced their concern about a budget that, at first look, threatens an 8 percent spending hike.

“This budget is too much of an increase, I think you all agree.” council President Denise DeMedeiros told the rest of the council at Monday’s meeting. “I almost had a heart attack” when I saw that it amounts to an 8 percent increase.

“We need to have a discussion with the Budget Committee because we are running very thin … we did tell them that last year,” she said.

Most of those debt costs, she said, are due to borrowing for new schools along with more recent requests for high school and middle school work.

Council member John Edwards said it is important to “put these numbers in a digestible format for the general public. Frankly there is going to be some sort of a tax increase.

The town needs to “show the people that the debt service that they voted to spend is what is driving the budget higher. They complain about the state of the roads and other stuff … We hear all these complaints about services for the taxpayers and they are going to turn around give us essentially no money with which … to provide those services while, on top of that, spending money we don’t have on bond issues they voted for.

“We have to be able to communicate that to the people who put us into office … I personally don’t want to spend hours and hours and hours of time on an exercise that” will produce a budget that goes nowhere. “I’m willing to take a dollar out of my pocket and chop it up to show where the money is going.

Councilor Randy Lebeau said he believes the school borrowing was necessary but “we knew this last year, that this was going to happen, that next year we will pay,” but we kicked the can down the road.