Dartmouth will soon see new positions for the town and schools and additional public land, as voters approved each of the 22 warrant articles at Tuesday’s annual Town Meeting — the first such meeting held in-person since 2019.

“It’s been a while,” Moderator Melissa Haskell said with a smile.

The bulk of the meeting focused  on the $96,814,219 operating budget for the upcoming fiscal year — a 2.27% increase from last year.

Roughly half of the budget — approximately $49 million — will go toward Dartmouth Public Schools, an increase of 4.7% over last year. A big reason for this, Assistant Superintendent of Finance and Operations Jim Kiely explained, is due to the addition of three new positions within the school district. 

“This better helps us focus on our curriculum and instructional needs of kids,” he said.

The rest of the budget went toward funding the other town departments, along with the restructuring and creation of new positions including Finance Systems Analyst, Assistant Council on Aging Director, Assistant Town Planner, and Assistant Town Administrator.Town Administrator Shawn MacInnes said the reason for those changes was out of necessity to ensure retention in town departments, along with creating succession plans and promoting quality people from within.

“This sets the town up for the future,” he said.

New positions represent a budget increase of $130,173.

Town Clerk Sarah Arruda will also see a bump in pay. She will now earn a salary of $91,709 for FY23, up from $79,350. According to MacInnes, the raise will make the salary comparable to other communities.

The clerk’s raise was approved through an article separate from the town’s budget.

There will also be an appropriation of $25,000 in Community Preservation funds for the Town Clerk to restore and preserve town documents dating back to the 1700s. Money would go toward repairing bindings on old papers.

According to Arruda, these will be available to the public upon request and her office will look to digitize them some time in the future.

Also approved was a $3.4 million capital plan. Money will go toward road reconstruction ($1,809,500), the replacement of four police cruisers ($234,871), and to purchase four Aqua Eye Scanners — a handheld sonar device that can identify bodies underwater up to an area of 85,000 square feet — for the Parks and Recreation Department ($24,000).

The town will also appropriate $721,000 from the Water Enterprise Fund to purchase water from the City of New Bedford. According to Interim Director of Public Works Tim Barber, this is to supplement the recent shutdowns of the Violetta and Panelli wells.

According to Barber, the Violetta well should be back online “in the near future.”

Members also approved the purchase of a 1.06-acre parcel of land located at 245 Russells Mills Road for $290,000.

According to MacInnes the land could be used for a potential community center or for additional recreational land.

Payment for the land will be done either through money from the American Rescue Plan or capital funding processes such as the town’s surplus revenue or a tax levy.