WILTON — The board of finance set a 19.31 mill rate after making few cuts in the town's $107,582,997 budget Wednesday night.

Finance board chairman Robert Kelso praised the work of the boards of education and selectmen for cutting everything they could before presenting their budgets to the finance board.

"They did a very good job and we didn't have to make many cuts," said Kelso.

Property owners will be taxed at a rate of $19.31 per $1,000 of assessment. A homeowner with a property with an assessed value of $1 million would pay $19,310. The tax rate will increase by 2.85 percent.

Although the finance board only chopped $16,000 from the selectmen's budget, which is actually coming out of the board of finance's budget for annual audits of town departments, the board decided to transfer $5.6 million from its ending fund balance to keep the mill rate down.

The ending fund balance is 11.4 percent of the budget, or $11.6 million. The board mulled over the idea of dropping it further but decided to keep it well above the 10 percent guideline set several years ago as a safety net.

New finance board member Al Alper, who is also the chairman of the Republican Town Committee, had been pushing for deeper cuts but in the end agreed with fellow board members.

"People were telling me 'cut, cut, cut' and that's the way I went in to this. But I saw the hard work they (by the boards of selectmen and education) put into this. The members of the board prevailed upon me with their logic to work cooperatively as opposed to driving the point (to reduce taxes) home with an exclamation mark," said Alper.

Alper spent some time Wednesday making amends with town officials after some biting comments the previous night.

During that session he said town managers didn't do enough to work together to find efficiencies by sharing services.

"No one speaks to one another," he said.

"How do you know that," the town's Chief Financial Officer Joe Dolan challenged Alper.

Alper continued by pointing to the requests by the fire and police departments for extra space, the fire department for training, the police department for computer servers.

"The rooms have two completely different purposes," snapped Dolan. "You don't want firefighters schlepping their equipment in to a room where they (police) have their servers," snapped Dolan.

Wednesday Alper said he didn't intend to question the professional competence and honesty of town managers.

"I ruffled some feathers but I didn't mean to question them. We have very honest, very hard working managers," said Alper.

Fellow board member Jim Meinhold, who had floated the idea of chopping $100,000 from the selectmen's budget, said he was comfortable with the final result.

"I think everyone felt reasonable comfortable with the work that had been done. A pretty good job had been done this year (by the selectmen and education boards)," said Meinhold.

Education is the largest portion of the budget as it accounts for $68.6 million of the $107.5 million. It's a 6.29 percent increase over last year. The board of selectmen's operating budget is $27,152,340 while the selectmen's capital budget is $1.6 million.

Overall the selectmen's budget increase is 4.7 percent.

The finance board meets April 22 to consider two bonded requests by the board of education. One is for $500,000 to pay for the high school roof and the second is for $450,000 for the design work for the high school's renovation project.

Wilton residents get their chance to vote on the budget at the Tuesday, May 6 annual town meeting. There is also a second vote planned for Saturday, May 10.