Schools

With Some Cost Cutting, Proposed Port Jeff School Budget Sticks to Tax Cap Limit

A decrease in number of high school class periods is a major cost savings in proposed budget.

Decreasing the number of class periods in the high school, realigning the elementary school and adjusting transportation will all be major factors in helping the stick to the 2 percent tax cap imposed by New York State last year, according to Assistant Superintendent for Business Sean Leister.

On Tuesday night Leister gave the public its first look at the Superintendent’s proposed budget for the 2012/2013 school year. The budget will be taken on the road and presented to interested parties and the public over the next few weeks, according to Superintendent Kenneth Bossert.

Leister said that the school board gave him the directive to stick to the 2 percent tax cap limit and that after working closely with the Budget Advisory Committee the school was able to come up with a budget that met that challenge.

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The proposed budget for the next school year came in at $38,045,901.50, a 1.85 percent increase from last year's budget. The overall tax levy is proposed to be $32,601,110.00, a tax levy increase of 2 percent on the nose.

Last year, the public approved a budget of $37.3 million by a very slim margin, representing an 8.93 percent increase in the tax rate for homeowners.

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In the board identified ways in which it strove to save money so as not to overly burden tax payers, knowing that the cap was going to be in place this year.

The dramatic increase of almost 9 percent on the tax levy last year allowed the school to build its budget based as it had done in the past, explained former Superintendent Max Riley when presenting the budget last year.

“It was not an increase in spending,” said Leister at the meeting on Tuesday when presenting the new budget. “It was an increase in how we were paying for it.”

The reserve had a balance of $4,526,936, as of June, 2011. That money, according to Leister, can be used to help buffer the impact of an anticipated decrease in tax revenue from LIPA if the utility is .

Moving from a 10-period to a nine-period day in the high school saves $600,000, according to the Superintendent’s budget presented on Tuesday.

Bossert stressed that the change doesn’t eliminate any classes or programs but it does limit flexibility with students to pick their first and second choices when making their schedules.

“We’re learning we will have classes with higher enrollment,” Bossert said.

The known impact, he said, was in savings and losing flexibility but said it was impossible to tell how the individual students will be affected. The savings will have to come from somewhere.

“To be blunt,” said Bossert. “It’s in staffing.”

Realignment of the elementary school saves another $450,000 in the budget. Leister said that savings will come from staffing changes and increasing class sizes.

The third biggest area where savings are realized in the proposed budget was in transportation by reducing the number of routes from 10 to nine, saving $100,000.

“Without making a profound change to the service to our students,” said Bossert.

Leister said they were able to look at actual ridership on the busses and found a way to decrease the bus routes over just using estimates.

The school also sees an MTA payroll tax savings of $70,000 but that item was always reimbursed by the state, making it budget neutral.

Other areas of savings included eliminating equipment upgrades to the school lunch program ($50,000), cutting overnight field trips ($20,000) and not inviting guest speakers to the Superintendent Conference Day ($5,000).

On the expense side, a major cost came from capital improvements, budgeted for $740,000 in the next school year.

“We would like to do these improvements. We need to do these improvements,” said Leister.

He said that if there is a big hit to the budget–as is expected from the tax grievance–they can eliminate them.

Because of a complication in the way the tax cap law is interpreted by state agencies, the capital improvement must be done in the year that they are budgeted or the district gets penalized in future tax caps.

Leister said that the tax cap formula is hard to master and one reason is that there is no one agency that can give a straight answer to questions the district may have.

“There’s no definitive authority to refer to for clear guidance,” he said.

The New York State Education Department and the Comptroller’s office are the two experts in tax cap law but Bossert said the information the school gets is sometimes conflicting.

“The information and assumptions that we were working on were incorrect,” Bossert said of the work the school was doing during the budget drafting process. “We are far from the only entity struggling with this.”

Another area where the school needs to spend money is replacing outdated and old equipment that is constantly in need of repair.

Equipment purchases of $155,000 are budgeted for grounds and maintenance to replace a broken down custodial use vehicle, a 30-year old industrial lawnmower, buffer and waxing machines and $30,000 for computer network upgrades.

Leister said that the school needs to purchase more memory and hardware.

“As technology use grows so does our use of hardware to support it,” he explained.

State mandates, contractural salary expenses and study guides for SAT prep courses make up the rest of the expenses presented in the budget.

Revenue increases include money coming from the PILOT Program going from $1,125,00 to $1,280,000, a 13.8 percent increase.

Although other districts are trying to , Bossert stressed that the Governor of New York sent a “strong message to voters that there is a 2 percent tax cap.”

“If we exceed that number then there is a misconception in the community that we can supersede that cap,” he said. “This is not the year to do this.”

Board member and chair of the Budget Advisory Committee Robert Ramus said that the board reviewed and evaluated the budget options that Leister proposed and gave feedback to help shape the current draft.

“I feel administration has done an excellent job of developing this budget,” he said.

Ramus stressed that in forming the budget, the administration listened to the board and the advisory committee and responded to public sentiment on what the community wants, preserving the most valued parts of the educational program.

Bossert said that he is making plans to present the budget to the public to clarify any questions and hear any comments people may have, which he feels is important because he wants the community to have all the facts when they go to vote in May.

“In absence of reality sometimes perception can become clouded,” he said.

The school budget proposal is available on the school district’s website for review. Voting on the school budget is set for Tuesday, May 15, 2012 from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. in the cafeteria at .


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