ROYALSTON – At its meeting on Oct. 29, the Selectboard set Saturday, Dec. 7, as the tentative date for a Special Town Meeting to decide on how more than $400,000 in free cash should be used.

The board will decide at its next meeting on Nov. 19 whether to go ahead and officially schedule the meeting. Plans call for the board to both open and close the warrant at that meeting.

Speaking with the Athol Daily News, Town Clerk Barbara Richardson confirmed the board has the authority to open and close the warrant at one of its own meetings. Usually, the warrant is kept open for several days to give residents and department heads time to submit articles to be considered.

The warrant must be posted at least two weeks before holding a Special Town Meeting and at least seven days before Annual Town Meeting. Holding the meeting on Dec. 7, said Richardson, will require her to hold a voter registration session on Nov. 27, the day before Thanksgiving.

The decision to hold the Special Town Meeting came at the suggestion of the Finance Committee. In correspondence to the board, the committee said the meeting should be called to distribute $411,000 in free cash. The committee is recommending $30,000 be taken from free cash to supplement the FY25 budget of the Police Department, among other items.

Voters at the June Annual Town Meeting approved a police budget of approximately $130,000; $100,839 to cover wages and $29,204 for expenses.

At Tuesday’s Selectboard meeting, committee member Linda Alger reminded the board that Police Chief Curtis Deveneau had recommended a FY25 budget of $184,000.

“It was funded at $130,000, so we met in the middle,” she said, said, referring to the recommendation to add $30,000 to the police budget.

Deveneau told the Athol Daily News via email that $184,000 is what he felt was needed for the current fiscal year. The $130,000 approved at Town Meeting he said, “was used as a starting point for discussion on (the) override.”

Although still short of what he felt was necessary, the $30,000 recommended by the FinCom, he said, will “fund the remaining fiscal year for police services.”

Deveneau also told the board at its meeting Tuesday that a $62,000 Proposition 2½ debt exclusion approved by voters in August likely won’t cover the cost of a new police cruiser, as intended.

“By the time we had our Town Meeting and then our [special election] ballot,” said Deveneau, “all new vehicles were long gone. They were SUVs from Ford that they’re no longer sending to New England, which hit a lot of departments, because a lot of them use Ford. Now the availability would pretty much be maybe the spring of next year. There is a 2024 Tahoe available, so we’re looking at maybe going with that. But at this time of the year, they’re practically gone.”

Deveneau explained it would take about $13,000 to outfit the Tahoe.

“That would be what we’d normally put into it, with the exception of a radar unit,” he said, adding that the unit currently used by the department is 10 years old. “So, we need just under $13,000 to outfit it as we normally do. The only way to lessen that would be to opt out of getting the radar unit, and if we opt out of getting the vehicle painted in the colors we use for the town.”

By foregoing the radar unit and paint job, said Deveneau, “we’d be looking at maybe around $8,000. So, we have to have that on the floor of the Town Meeting as well in order to get that funding for the vehicle.”

In addition to funding for the police, the committee also recommended using free cash in the amount of about $54,000 to pay off a bond for cleanup of an oil spill at the public works barn, with another $230,000 going to various stabilization accounts.

Greg Vine can be reached at gvineadn@gmail.com.