WESTPORT — These are trying times for balancing a town budget.

So said a report by the Finance Committee delivered by committee Vice President Shana Shufelt at the outset of Town Meeting. The recommended budget was later passed with little audience comment.

The report states, in part:

We meet again facing difficult financial circumstances that are largely the result of the decrease in the proportion of state local aid that began in 2008, coupled with a continued imposition on the town of unfunded and underfunded mandates. We are also again experiencing significant costs associate with a winter of record levels of snowfall, continue to confront the challenges and opportunities brought to the forefront with the discover of PCBs at the Middle School, and still have no recurring capital budget to refresh out chives, buildings and other town assets.

Our difficult financial situation is projected to continue into the indefinite future. In the short term, our operating budget is now being supplemented with nearly $170,000 from free cash in FY16 and, unless significant changes are made, we will require nearly $400,000 of free cash in FY17 to maintain the same level of service. Further, in the long term, we, like most municipalities, face unfunded future pension and other post-employment benefit liabilities estimated at over $54 million.

With this budget, we once again avoided significant service cuts but do very little to either increase revenues or reduce costs. It is unlikely that state aid will soon be returned to former levels, and the electorate continues to show little interest in increasing revenues through a Proposition 2.5 override or debt exclusions. In the very near future we must either find a way to significantly increase local revenues or meaningfully reduce expenses.

Last year’s budget responded to this situation with cuts in the school system, continuation of vacancies in town positions, reductions in services, the elimination of a capital improvement budget, and failure to make appropriations to the Stabilization Fund or the Other Post Employment Benefit Fund that we had started the year prior. This year, the Board of Selectmen considered the possibility of presenting to us a budget that effected savings by eliminating as many as a dozen town positions, but ultimately shrank from suggesting such extreme measures for FY16.

Our proposed budget is the result of our effort, after hearing from all interested parties, to balance appropriately the budget we ultimately received from the Selectmen. The primary difference between the two is found in the overall town budget where we have made recommendations reducing expenditures under the warrant’s money articles so as to bring the overall town budget into balance.

The proposed FY16  opening budget exceeds last ear’s by $1,547,903, an increase of 4.73 percent. Much of the increase is, as usual, caused by budgets over which we have little or no control, e.g. regional schools, state/county assessments, and pensions. Debt service has gone up as a result of the failure of the debt exclusion question at the polls. General government and other town departments have increased due to a restoration of stipends (removed in FY 2015), increases in the Reserve Fund and data processing departments, and a small labor contract increase for most employees.

The operating budget is balanced only by means of a significant infusion of Free Cash. This is contrary to a  general policy — adopted in broad principle by the Board of Selectmen and the Finance Committee — that operating expenses should not be covered by non-recurring revenues that cannot be relied upon from year to year … Our conservative approaches, which lead to this year’s large Free Cash balance, created a cushion that will no longer be available after this year. This makes it all the more urgent that we find methods for eliminating or radically reducing the dependent of the operating budget on Free Cash in future years …