It was disappointing to see such a small turnout of town officials, parents, and concerned citizens at the public hearing on next year’s school budget. One might assume this was due to the low average increase in assessments for the towns’ share of the budget (2.11 percent); however the town officials who were there and spoke are asking for level funded assessments. I think we’d all be happy if they were asking for even a ‘level funded’ school budget (that would be $426,534 more than the reduced budget we are putting forward) but essentially they were asking to pay the same next year as this year, which would require a further reduction in assessments of nearly $190,000.
At the hearing, town officials said they aren’t looking for any more cuts in the district budget, but simply a reduction in town assessments. Their suggestion was to have Gateway use more of its revolving or reserved funds. As I’ve written before, this is a dangerous slope to start down. If we continue to use more of our ever-shrinking reserve funds to lower town assessments, we’ll get to the point that maintaining student services will require huge increases in town assessments. If we use $190,000 this year and then don’t have that much in reserves next year, town assessments would automatically increase $190,000 the following year—even if no other changes were made. If the school committee did this for two to three years, and didn’t make additional cuts to student services, we’d reach a point where we’d have no reserve money left to help fund the budget; At that point, we’d be faced with either an unsustainable increase in assessments or a devastating reduction in services.
So, if we were to use a level funded budget this year and keep assessments the same as last year, we’d have to use $617,000 of our reserves (over the nearly $450,000 we’ve already used). Over just two years we’d have no money left and would have offset assessments by over $2 million, thus requiring either an increase in assessments of $2 million or require $2 million dollars more in cuts to keep assessments level. If an increase in assessments this year of $190,000 isn’t possible, what’s going to change in three years to allow assessments to increase over $2,000,000?
At the same time that town officials are asking the district to use more of its revolving and other funds to offset town assessments, they appeared unwilling to use their own free cash and stabilization funds to offset their tax increases because that’s not fiscally prudent (which is also why our auditor told the school committee that the district should not use its own revolving or ‘reserve’ funds to offset expenditures and town assessments). If we’re going to compare free cash and reserve fund amounts (they’re labeled differently in the towns and schools) between the school and towns, we’d find that some of our towns have nearly half of their annual budgets set aside, far more than the school is able to save. However the real question is: shouldn’t both the towns and school district be using the same set of rules? If the district uses additional money to lower assessments, shouldn’t the towns do the same?
As I noted at the meeting, we cannot ‘cut’ our way out of the problem because the problem isn’t expenditures, it’s a reduction in revenue from the state. If the state fulfilled their promise regarding regional transportation and took into consideration the recommendations of the Chapter 70 Review Committee, we would not have a problem. Further challenges include a failure by the state to fully fund the PILOT program for the towns, an inability of the towns to attract commercial and business growth to the communities, the difficulty of collecting back taxes, and the general decrease in property values throughout our communities (which would be further exacerbated by having failing schools). There are certainly no easy answers but just looking for efficiencies in operations and reducing budgets isn’t the long-term solution to our financial problems.
For this year, we’re hoping for some additional state aid to reduce town assessments and have determined that a mere 85% regional transportation reimbursement would allow town assessments to be the same as last year. Or if we could convince Worthington to pay their fair share of retirement costs incurred during the years they were part of the district, all town assessment increases would be under 2 ½ percent. Transportation reimbursement can be impacted if enough people contact their legislators. Also, the school committee and towns have voted to appeal the court’s decision regarding Worthington’s withdrawal, but I don’t expect to see results from the legal process in time to help this year’s budget. In any case, the budget process continues to move forward towards our annual town meetings.
