The city of Gardiner’s proposed budget that City Council will likely approve Wednesday will raise taxes by 2.4 percent, equaling a $73 increase for those who own homes priced at the city’s median.

The proposed $5.4 million budget, given initial approval by a 6-2 vote at the council’s July 1 meeting, is about $70,000 less than the budget with a 3.4 percent tax increase City Manager Scott Morelli recommended in April.

Much of the council’s discussion about the city budget involved the roughly $115,000 Morelli recommended giving to nonprofit organizations, an amount encompassing about 2 percent of the overall city budget and slightly down from previous years.

The most vocal critic of the donations to nonprofit organizations, largely the combined $101,572 traditionally given to the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Gardiner, Johnson Hall Performing Arts Center and Gardiner Main Street, has been Councilor Maureen Blanchard, elected as an at-large councilor in November. Blanchard, who was one of two councilors to vote against the initial approval of the budget, said at the meeting July 1 that she thinks the city should more heavily scrutinize the requests from the nonprofit organizations and make the organizations show why they need the money every year.

Supporters of the three nonprofit organizations packed the meeting room July 1, many saying the organizations provide invaluable services to the community.

Mayor Thomas Harnett told councilors at the meeting he thinks the council spends too much time discussing the nonprofits compared to the rest of the budget and that it heard “overwhelming support” for the nonprofits from community members at the meeting.

“Year after year that they’re held up as sort of this pinata that we’re going to take whacks at, and I think it’s a waste of time,” Harnett said.

City Council will hold the final public hearing and reading at its meeting scheduled for 6 p.m. Wednesday.

The other councilor to vote against the budget July 1, Philip Hart, said he couldn’t support it because the cuts to reach the 2.4 percent tax increase from the 3.4 percent Morelli recommended weren’t permanent cuts. He told councilors at the meeting that he may support it in the second vote scheduled for Wednesday.

If approved, the budget is expected to increase the property tax rate from $20.60 per $1,000 of assessed value to $21.10, equaling a $50 tax increase for a property assessed at $100,000.

“I know a lot of us can afford an extra $50, and it doesn’t hurt you because you can reach in your wallet and grab it,” Hart told councilors July 1. “But there are people out there, every time we take a dollar from their pocket, they have to stop. They either got to not buy food or give up something else. Those are the people that really need our help.”

When Morelli presented his recommended $5.48 million city budget to councilors in April, he told them he thought it was the year to finally “bite the bullet” and raise taxes more substantially, as opposed to pushing off funding requests or using reserves to keep taxes down as councilors have done in recent years. Along with the 2.4 percent tax increase from the school budget, which was approved by voters in Gardiner by a 133-73 margin, the budget would have raised taxes by 5.8 percent.

Last year, councilors approved a city budget to raise taxes by 1.5 percent following three out of four years of flat taxes from the city’s portion of the budget.

Councilors told Morelli at their meeting June 17 to bring the proposed tax increase down to 2.4 percent, even though city spending was up less than a percent in Morelli’s recommended budget. City spending in the budget councilors will review again Wednesday is down by less than 1 percent.

A little more than half of the $70,000 Morelli cut out of his recommended budget comes from delaying the hiring of a children’s librarian and a police officer until at least November.

Other proposed cuts included dropping the city’s membership in the Mayors’ Coalition on Jobs and Economic Development, further reducing the city’s marketing budget, delaying the purchase of new tablets for councilors and delaying the restoration of old city documents.

In his initial budget presentation and again at the last council meeting, Morelli told councilors that if the state fully funded municipal revenue sharing as required by law, the city would be receiving an additional $564,495 in state aid next year, leading to a tax decrease.

“I just want to remind people that this is a situation that the state has very much helped put us all in,” Morelli said at the July 1 meeting.

Paul Koenig — 621-5663

pkoenig@centralmaine.com

Twitter: @pdkoenig