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Ringo Starr and his wife, Barbara, are asking $4.5 million for their three-bedroom vacation home near Aspen, Colorado.
The 70-year-old Beatles drummer, who continues to tour with his All Starr Band, bought the home in 1990. The wood cabin sits on about 16 flat acres in Woody Creek and has frontage on Roaring Fork River. The roughly 3,200-square-foot cabin was built in 1987 and is surrounded by unused horse paddocks.Â
Next year’s budget will have to increase by 5.12 percent, or $5.97 million, Â in order to maintain current staffing and programming at the Bedford Central School District.
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School officials detailed their estimates and forecasts for next year’s budget during Wednesday’s Bedford school board meeting. Â
The ‘go forward budget,’ or the budget to maintain existing programming and services, is estimated to be $122,450,000 next school year. That represents a 5.12 percent increase from this year’s budget.Â
“We’re assuming that we’re not going to get any increase in class sections, or any changes in class sections with no problematic changes to the student needs at this point,” said Mark Betz, the district’s assistant superintendent for business and administrative services.Â
These figures also assume that the district will use $4.4 million in budget reserves to help lower the tax levy.
The budget also doesn’t take into account the possible passage of property tax cap by the state Legislature. Governor-elect Andrew Cuomo’s property tax cap proposal would limit the amount of tax school district by 2 percent or the rate inflation.
One of the biggest thing driving up the budget are increased state employee and teacher pension funds, which are anticipated to increase by 35 percent next year, according to Betz.Â
Betz said those pension contributions are mandated by the state and that the district has no control over them.Â
“Just take that $2 million and think of that in terms of your tax levy,” Betz said. “Your tax levy, right now, is at $103 million. So, essentially, 2 percent is now added to your levy before you start just in pensions.”
Westchester County Executive Robert Astorino vetoed the 2011 budget sent to his desk by the Board of Legislators, citing reservations dealing with its revenues and spending. A total of 247 lines were struck out.
“The combination of phony revenues, wasteful spending, unfunded liabilities, illegal actions and rejection of generally accepted accounting principles jeopardizes our AAA credit ratings,” Astorino said of the $1.79 billion budget in a press announcement about his decision.
Legislators passed their budget on Friday. It calls for a two-percent tax decrease but with fewer reductions in social services than called for by Astorino, who proposed a series of cuts in November, as part of a budget version that calls for a one-percent tax decrease.
Despite the legislators’ 16-1 vote in favor of the budget, Astorino, a Republican, accused the board’s Democrats of not giving enough time for his administration or legislators in his party to scrutinize the proposal.
The legislators’ approved budget has been defended by Democrats for its treatment of taxes and services.
In an appearance before the New Castle Town Board Tuesday, County Legislator Mike Kaplowitz gave an update on the proposed budget, which he defended as something that “continues to provide essential services,” and listed what is covered.
Majority Leader Peter Harckham, whose district includes Mount Kisco and Bedford, had similar comments when the budget was passed.
Cole Perkins pretty much gets it that he’s not exactly your average 13-year-old. For one thing, he’s totally uninterested in video games. And he attends “cyber school” — a home-schooling arrangement that tethers him to a classroom teacher via computer.
Then there’s that blogging thing. Where other kids might be blogging away about sports or television or popular music, that’s just too mainstream.
Cole Perkins blogs, instead, about luxury real estate.
He recently became something of a real estate keyword after Curbed.com posted an item about Lavish-Property.com, his fledgling site that each day features a new-to-the-market estate in North America or Europe, with extensive photography and his commentary.
The site, which he began a couple of months ago, surged from about 15 page views a day to more than 2,000 in the period immediately after the Curbed post. Things have settled down a bit since then, he said, to 400 to 500 a day. The blog, he said, is an “extracurricular activity,” a byproduct of tagging along with his parents four years ago when they were house hunting in Hershey, Pa.
“I just kind of got into houses when (my parents) were looking at houses every weekend,” he said in an interview. “I found it kind of fun, looking at different styles of architecture.”
Barring unlikely last-minute changes, Bedford property taxes will climb 2½ percent next year despite across-the-board cuts in the town’s discretionary spending.
At a public hearing Tuesday, the town board formally unveiled its tentative 2011 budget, which calls for $25.1 million in spending, largely financed by a property-tax rate of $29.38 and higher fees for town services.
The budget presented Tuesday night would automatically take effect Jan. 1 if the town board does not act on it by Dec. 20.
It cuts all departments’ spending, as it has for the past three years. In 2011, however, the departmental funding reductions, averaging about 10 percent, will extend to the town’s three libraries, which had been spared in the earlier economies.
Saying he spoke for all the libraries, Ed Baum, president of the Katonah Village Library board of trustees, told the board, “We are living in an atmosphere of great uncertainty.”
Besides Baum, only Fiona Mitchell of Bedford Hills, who urged the town to stop leaf pickups, and another audience member who agreed, were the only speakers at the hearing
Bedford
Home-mortgage rates climbed this week, with the average rate on the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at its highest since the end of June, according to Freddie Mac’s weekly survey of conforming mortgages, released on Thursday.
Rates on the 30-year mortgage averaged 4.61% for the week ended Dec. 9, up from 4.46% last week. It is the fourth week in a row that the mortgage rate rose; it averaged 4.81% a year ago.
“Interest rates for 30-year fixed mortgages are now almost a half percentage point higher than the record low set in mid-October, which for a $200,000 conventional loan amounts to $50 more in monthly payments,” said Frank Nothaft, chief economist, Freddie Mac, in a news release.
Fifteen-year fixed-rate mortgages also rose this week, averaging 3.96%, up from last week’s 3.81%, according to the survey. The mortgage averaged 4.32% a year ago.
Meanwhile, adjustable-rate mortgages also moved higher, with the five-year Treasury-indexed hybrid adjustable-rate mortgage averaging 3.6% this week, up from 3.49% last week. The ARM averaged 4.26% a year ago. And one-year Treasury-indexed ARMs averaged 3.27%, up from 3.25% last week. The ARM averaged 4.24% a year ago.