By Staff Reporter
CHEEKTOWAGA — The Cheektowaga Town Board has cleared the legal path for a tax increase well above the state’s cap. Whether it actually takes that path will be argued at Town Hall next Tuesday, and a close read of the town’s own budget shows where most of the money would go: underground.
On Oct. 13, the board adopted Local Law No. 9 of 2026, which authorizes the town to levy more in property taxes for 2027 than the state limit allows. Under state law it needed a 60% supermajority. Supervisor Brian Nowak and council members Brian Pilarski, Tiffany Collins, Monica Elderkin and Parvez Rahman, all Democrats, voted yes; Republicans Barbara Bakowski and Vernon Thompson voted no, the Cheektowaga Bee reported.
The vote does not adopt a budget. It lets the board pass one that breaks the cap if it chooses.
What the tentative budget does
Mr. Nowak’s 2027 tentative budget, filed Sept. 30, would raise the total town tax levy 9.8%, from $75,541,079 to $82,941,609. Spending across all funds would rise 5.95%, to $120.4 million.
For a house assessed at the town average of $155,400, the budget’s own summary puts the total town bill at $2,083.74, up $201.80 from $1,881.94.
The biggest piece of that is the sewer. The Consolidated Sewer District’s levy would climb 26.5%, from $13.5 million to $17.1 million. Its tax rate would rise from 18.6 cents to 85.5 cents per $1,000 of assessed value, about $104 more on the average house. That is more than half of the total increase, before counting a $17.64 rise in the separate sewer consumption fee.
The sewer district’s spending is not what’s jumping; it rises about 5%. What changes is the cushion. The district used $3.7 million of its reserves in the 2025 budget and $3 million in 2026, according to the town’s budget-prep report. The 2027 plan uses $300,000.
Elsewhere, the general fund levy would rise 5.1%, garbage district taxes 10.7%, and the highway fund’s levy would go from $19,447 to $585,691. The lighting district levy would fall 15%.
The supervisor’s case
Mr. Nowak has framed the increase as the bill for years of budgets that spent savings. In an Oct. 8 column in the Bee, he wrote that the need “comes from a growing structural deficit (mainly our consolidated sewer district) in addition to the rising costs in the town.”
He pointed to the 2022 and 2023 budgets, which he said added $5 million in spending and only $3,000 in levy. “It was as if the town sold a used car to cover millions in new costs — that simply doesn’t work,” Mr. Nowak wrote.
He also blamed this year’s budget. “My 2026 Tentative Budget called for a tax levy increase of 7.6 percent that was rejected by the town board,” Mr. Nowak said, according to the Bee. “As a result of the board-adopted 2026 budget that I went on record against, the town returned to growing structural deficits.” WGRZ reported last November that the board had pared that proposal to about 2.5%.
Mr. Nowak said the sewer equipment portion of the town’s replacement plan went unfunded, “marking one of the toughest decisions made to present a budget that maintains our town’s services while meeting our immediate needs.”
The town’s director of administration and finance, Brian Krause, laid out the same arithmetic at a January hearing. From 2020 to 2026, spending rose $20.6 million while the town’s planned use of reserves more than doubled, the Bee reported.
“While we have these budgets in place, they’re structurally unbalanced,” Mr. Krause said. “All I’m highlighting here is that the budget’s out of balance. And if we don’t balance it, at some point, the town will be bankrupt.”
The pushback
Residents have pushed back at every step. At the Oct. 13 meeting, the Rev. Richard “Rick” Maisano, a former deputy supervisor under Mr. Nowak, cited seniors on fixed incomes and called the town “unaffordable,” the Bee reported. Another speaker, Dan Kollander, urged the board to say “no” to department requests and questioned how claims are audited now that the controller’s position is gone.
Questions worth asking
The budget leaves some things for the board to test before it votes.
One is the hotel bed tax. Mr. Nowak criticized the 2026 budget for leaning on “speculative revenues.” His 2027 plan counts on $1.5 million from the town’s new occupancy tax, three times the $500,001 budgeted this year. The town’s budget-prep report lists $175,597 collected this year as of the report’s Sept. 30 date and projects $900,000 for all of 2026.
Another is the reserves that remain. The general fund would still draw $6.8 million from fund balance, and the highway fund $3.7 million, more than this year. Mr. Nowak has said the plan “merely maintains the fund balances at our 15% minimum fund balances.”
And the sewer district deserves its own accounting: how its reserves were spent down, what the unfunded equipment is, and what happens to rates in 2028 if nothing changes.
What comes next
The board will hold a public hearing on the preliminary budget, the lighting districts and the garbage district at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 27, at Town Hall, Broadway and Union Road. A separate hearing on the sewer, drainage and hydrant district rolls is set for the same evening. The budget must be adopted by Nov. 20, and the board can still amend it.
The Buffalo Chronicle is seeking comment from Mr. Nowak, Mr. Krause and the board’s two Republican members.
Featured photo: Cheektowaga Town Hall on Broadway. Photo by Adam Moss via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0, cropped.
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