There have been several interesting financial developments for the district, each of which may have a significant impact on our towns. For those following the Worthington withdrawal, you know that DESE will host a meeting in the Gateway Performing Arts Center on Wednesday, December 3 beginning at 6:30 p.m. to collect information for the State Legislature on the impact of the withdrawal. If you’ve looked at our estimates, that net impact on the district was originally determined to be just over $600,000 to the remaining 6 towns. Estimates provided by members of the Worthington Ad Hoc Committee note that the financial impact will be even greater on the Town of Worthington. Thus the financial aspects of this withdrawal impact all of the district’s seven towns.
To further aggravate this financial picture, the district and the Town of Worthington have recently been named in a lawsuit filed by Ruth Kennedy (she also named the DESE, the House, the Senate, and the Governor in her lawsuit, the entirety of which may be found on the Gateway website). While there is much going on in relation to this lawsuit and how the district will respond, the fact is that all of this work entails significant legal fees for the district. In the meantime, the towns are getting ready to file another lawsuit against the Town of Worthington, which will also force the district to become involved in some degree and cause further expenditures of scarce financial resources.
Anyone who’s been following the news also knows that the Commonwealth is facing over a $300 million shortfall in revenues based upon the automatic rollback of the income tax rate in January (one would have thought that this might have been anticipated). Governor Patrick has indicated that he wants to resolve this problem before Mr. Baker takes office in January. The Governor, in many news reports, has indicated he will do this using 9C cuts and not dip into the rainy day fund. To this end, we are all waiting to see what the Governor will cut using his executive powers and whether this will directly or indirectly impact Gateway, as he has cut transportation reimbursement in previous uses of his 9C authority. In any case it’s a good bet that this will impact our constituents in a variety of ways.
The argument that the school committee and administration should be able to forecast these types of activities more than a year before they happen is almost as improbable as believing that weather forecasters will get the forecast right a year ahead (or perhaps even the day before). A good example of this is work with the DEP over the last several years to resolve the issue with the water supply for the Gateway complex. The district signed an agreement with the DEP to replace the well and had an initial estimate for drilling the well. Now, after completing a preliminary engineering study, we find that the cost of the project has increased three-fold, certainly more than we had anticipated needing to comply with our consent order.
Needless to say, we will continue to monitor these situations closely with the intent of minimizing their impact on our ability to meet the needs of our students. As things unfold, follow along in the Worthington Withdrawal blog, which is linked from the homepage of the Gateway website (www.grsd.org).
