JAY — The Select Board and the Budget Committee voted Monday to approve a $5.86 million municipal budget for 2023-24.

The proposal will go to a public hearing at 6 p.m. March 13 at the Spruce Mountain Elementary School gym. It will go to voters at the polls from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. April 25 at the Community Building.

The proposal reflects an increase of $363,938 over this fiscal year budget without factoring in an estimated $2.7 million in revenues. Factoring in revenues the budget would be $3.16 million

The board voted to take $13,000 for summer recreation and $18,802 for donations out of the Tower/Recreation Reserve Account to lower the budget to $5.86 million. It had been initially proposed at $5.88 million. That would drop the reserve account balance to about $140,979. However, money is added into the account each year and there is a plan to harvest timber on the town recreation land behind the high school. That money will go back into the reserve fund.

Both panels voted to add $9,300 into the Fire Rescue Department budget to make it $330,639. It would eliminate the on-call person and hire a per diem person.

The Fire Rescue Department had proposed two options for the budget: Switch the on-call position to per diem or keep it the same as is for $321,339.

Chief Mike Booker recommended the first option while he works his full-time job at Mexico Fire Department.

“The reason I would like to change to per diem is because there was 44 on-call shifts that were not filled out of 90 available shifts,” Booker said. “Calls were up this year, we responded to 433 calls, 61 of those were to Livermore Falls.”

The per diem shift has nothing to do with Livermore Falls, just the Jay department, he said.

If the Livermore Falls calls were subtracted and the first responder calls not counted, they still responded to 353 calls last year.