Most people who drive through Geddes never think about what it costs to run. They pass the State Fairgrounds on Route 690, cut through Westvale on the way to Camillus, or turn onto Woods Road without registering that they have crossed into a town of 17,088 people that operates its own police force, its own highway department and its own court.

The Town of Geddes has published what all of that costs. Its adopted 2026 budget, posted as a line item document through the town’s code portal, runs to more than a thousand lines and ends with three numbers that frame everything else.

Total revenue: $15,826,356. Total expenses: $15,961,300. Appropriated fund balance: $134,944.

That last figure is the gap. Geddes plans to spend $134,944 more in 2026 than it expects to collect, and it plans to cover the difference by drawing down money it already has rather than by raising new revenue. The arithmetic is exact. Subtract the revenue line from the expense line and you get $134,944 to the dollar, which is the amount the budget document itself lists as appropriated fund balance.

Using a budget gap of that size is not unusual for a town of this scale, and it is not the same thing as a deficit in the way a household would understand one. Fund balance is accumulated surplus, and appropriating some of it is a deliberate choice a board makes when it would rather spend savings than increase a levy. What it does mean is that the 2026 budget as adopted does not balance on current-year revenue alone.

For scale, $15,961,300 spread across 17,088 residents is about $934 per person per year, or roughly $2.56 a day for every man, woman and child in the town. That figure covers police patrols, plowed streets, a court, a recreation center, code inspections, a historian and the pension and insurance obligations attached to everyone who delivers those things. It does not cover schools, which are funded separately through the school districts that serve the town, and it does not cover county services, which arrive on a different line of the same tax bill.

That distinction trips up almost every conversation about local taxes. The town line is usually the smallest of the three, and it is also the only one where a resident can show up on a Tuesday night and talk to the people who set it.

### The police department is the largest thing Geddes does

Geddes is one of a shrinking number of Onondaga County towns that still runs its own police department rather than contracting with the Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office or relying on the State Police. The 2026 budget shows what that independence costs.

The department’s salary lines alone total $2,297,490 across sixteen separate accounts. The largest single line is patrol officer salaries at $1,605,634. The chief is budgeted at $158,831 and the captain at $136,273. Beyond base pay, the budget carries $105,000 for patrol overtime, $91,980 for night differential, $85,546 for holiday pay, $18,000 for the STOP DWI program and $25,000 for part-time officers.

Add the department’s eighteen non-salary accounts, which cover everything from $55,000 in fuel to $30,000 in uniforms to $16,700 in software, and the operating total reaches $2,548,190.

But the true cost of a police department does not sit in the police account. It sits in the accounts that follow it. Geddes budgets $715,241 for police retirement in a separate line, plus $106,667 in statutory installment bond principal for police cars and $12,800 in interest on those same vehicles.

Stack all of it together and policing costs the town $3,382,898 in 2026. That is 21.2 percent of the entire $15,961,300 budget, or roughly $198 for every resident counted in the 2020 census.

### Benefits are the quiet second story

The budget’s other dominant theme is not a department at all. It is the cost of insuring and retiring the people who work for the town.

In the part-town fund, hospital and medical insurance is budgeted at $700,000, with another $65,000 set aside for a lifetime benefit, for a combined $765,000. Dental insurance adds $27,456. The general fund carries a separate $422,900 hospital and medical line of its own.

Retirement follows the same pattern. Beyond the $715,241 police retirement figure, the town budgets $36,455 for state retirement in the part-town fund, $185,500 for Social Security and $43,383 for Medicare.

These are not discretionary numbers in any practical sense. They are the accumulated result of contracts, state pension formulas and insurance markets, and a town board has limited room to move them in a single budget cycle. They are also the reason a town budget can grow without a single new service being added.

### What the rest of the money buys

Below the payroll and benefits lines, the budget reveals a town doing a lot of small things.

Code enforcement runs $129,480, including $74,433 for the code enforcement officer, $39,761 for the code enforcement clerk and $7,666 for the fire marshal. The zoning board costs $35,774, and $15,000 of that is legal fees, more than the chairman and every member are paid combined. The planning board runs $21,980, with $6,000 of it in legal fees.

The highway side is where visible work happens. Street resurfacing is budgeted at $210,000, highway salaries at $553,878, diesel at $50,000 and gasoline at $30,000. Tree removal gets $10,000 and drainage improvements $5,000.

The highway payroll is worth pulling apart, because it shows how much of a public works budget is not straight wages. Base highway salaries run $553,878, but the fund also carries $88,952 for vacation and personal time, $67,205 for holiday pay, $53,764 for sick time, $20,000 for summer help, $7,200 for a clothing allowance, $6,750 for longevity, $6,000 for a health insurance stipend, $5,000 for overtime and $1,800 for a meal allowance. Equipment repair adds another $105,046 in salaries plus $5,000 in overtime.

Keeping the trucks running costs real money on its own: $65,000 for truck repair and maintenance, $40,000 for machinery and equipment repair, and $9,000 for oil and filters. Set against that, the $210,000 street resurfacing line is the part residents actually see, and it is smaller than what the town spends keeping the equipment that does the resurfacing on the road.

Unallocated insurance in the highway fund runs $47,878, with $4,500 for a safety program and $900 for employee testing.

Then there are the lines that cost almost nothing and say the most about a place. The town historian is budgeted at $1,600. Band concerts get $4,800. The Carno Recreation Center runs $84,840. The library line is $20,000. Auditing the town’s own funds costs $40,000, which is twenty five times what the historian gets.

The contingency fund, the money set aside for whatever the year brings that no one predicted, is $15,000. That is less than one tenth of one percent of the budget. A single significant legal judgment, equipment failure or storm response would exhaust it immediately, which in practice means unplanned costs get handled through budget modifications during the year rather than from a reserve.

Geddes also plans to move $82,986 out of the general fund and into its capital project fund, which is how towns of this size accumulate money for things too expensive to buy in one year.

### Reading the document yourself

The general fund, the piece of the budget that everyone in town pays into regardless of whether they live inside the Village of Solvay, totals $2,966,626 in expenses. That is 18.6 percent of the town’s overall spending. The larger share sits in the part-town fund, which covers services delivered outside the village, and in the highway and special district funds.

That structure matters for anyone trying to read their tax bill. A Solvay resident and a Westvale resident are not paying into all of the same funds, and the police and code enforcement lines that dominate the part-town fund are not distributed evenly across everyone the town serves.

The full budget is public. It is posted through the Town of Geddes website under Board Meetings, alongside the 2026 procurement policy, the committee assignments and the annual stormwater report. Town Hall is at 1000 Woods Road and the phone number is 315 468 3600.

CNY Signal reviewed the adopted document line by line for this story. Every figure above comes from that budget rather than from a summary or a press release, and the totals reconcile with the document’s own stated revenue, expense and fund balance figures.

What the numbers do not tell you is whether any of it is the right amount. A budget is a set of decisions already made. The place to argue about them is the next one, and towns in New York build their following year’s budget in the fall, with tentative budgets typically filed in late September and adopted in November.