MARVIN – Village leaders are considering a slightly lower property tax rate for the 2026-27 fiscal year but not necessarily at the expense of ignoring future road maintenance.
The Marvin Village Council held its first budget work session of 2026 on April 6. Village Manager Christina Amos presented a nearly $3.7 million general fund budget with a 5.3-cent tax rate.
Residents currently pay a 5.63-cent tax rate. Amos explained that the village can’t go below a 5-cent tax rate if leaders want to continue receiving Powell Bill funding from the state for local road maintenance.
“This is our first initial stab at the budget,” Amos told the council. “I’m sure you all will have some questions, some recommendations and what we’ll do from here is go back to the drawing board and make those changes. And at the next budget work session, we’ll go over those changes.”
Council Member Bob Nunnenkamp proposed the idea of reducing the tax rate by 3% instead of 6.3%.
“I think I know what we all want to accomplish,” Nunnenkamp said. “If possible, we want a lower budget, and people are concerned about taxes. I get that. The one thing that concerns me is if we reduce our tax base too much, then the opportunity or the need to take budget increases in the future might be greater than if we didn’t take as much of the tax reduction.”
Council Member John Baresich said shifting the tax rate from 5.6 cents to 5.3 cents would allow a million-dollar home to save about $30 per year on their tax bill.
While Amos was going through her presentation, Mayor Pro Tempore Angel Martin identified a couple of line items she would like to see increased. One of those was $200,000 for fog sealing, a technique used to fix cracks in pavement.
The other item was $150,000 for a new savings account to help pay for restorative road maintenance about 10 years from now. The amount is a placeholder until an ad hoc committee recommends a final number.
Amos reminded the council that adding to these amounts would require cuts elsewhere in the budget or a tax increase. Finance Director Jill Carilli said she would need a dollar amount from the council.
“If you as a consensus can tell me how much you all feel comfortable putting in that maintenance and how much you all want to try to save in restorative, I will try to make it happen,” Carilli said. “But I need numbers to be able to move forward.”
Baresich said he’d like to see how road maintenance would be affected if they maintained the current tax rate.
Carilli said that it’s doable to increase fog sealing to $250,000 and restorative maintenance to $200,000 within the current tax rate with some rounding out of the budget.
Amos asked if there was consensus around bringing a budget to the next session that maintains the current tax rate and applies additional revenues toward road maintenance.
“I think that’s a good idea, but I also like it the way it was presented,” Council Member Bob Marcolese said.
Baresich liked the idea as well.
“I’d like to see it because I don’t know that it’s real instructive, if we’re only cutting the average tax bill by $30 or $40 and then just having to come back next year to raise it twice or three times that,” he said. “I think we’d want to be more planning-minded than that – rather than reactive.”
The next budget work session is scheduled for 5 p.m. May 4 at Marvin Village Hall, 10006 Marvin School Road.