Now that the House One Budget (also known as the Governor’s Budget) is out, the school committee has begun reviewing town assessments. Overall, state revenue remains fairly stable but given the ongoing lawsuit with Worthington over funding owed the district, which hasn’t historically been paid, we reduced anticipated revenue for that item. In addition, the state decreased minimum contributions across all towns resulting in an increase in their above minimum contribution. When everything is considered, we anticipate that the overall assessment for the six towns will be up by 2.71% or $245,688. If we had Worthington’s contribution for what we feel they owe for retiree costs, the overall assessment increase would only be $160,298 – essentially one percent.
You’ll recall, as projected in earlier correspondence (and posted on the website and superintendent’s blog in the beginning of January); the overall expenditure budget is up approximately one percent (1%) from the current budget ($159,386). The projected budget for next year is $1,787,006 less than the FY’09 budget, does not include a number of items that have been recommended by various groups, and includes nearly a million dollars in increased costs to the district (major cost increases come from insurance, out of district tuition, and meeting the needs of students who require specialized services).
While all of our towns’ face various financial challenges, the current assessments vary dramatically from town to town based primarily on the percentage of students each town has in the district. Thus we have three towns with decreases in overall assessments (ranging from -1.76% to -5.94%) and three towns with increases in their overall assessments (ranging from 1.38% to 9.51%). Once again this shows the inconsistency over time of the existing formula for setting town assessments and the rapid swings that often occur when student numbers change from year to year.
The district does have a currently available alternative under the regional agreement. This option takes the overall assessment and breaks it down strictly by student percentage (i.e., as long as each town meets the state’s ‘minimum’ spending, there is no other relation to the state’s formula). This year that would make the town assessments even more disparate and would give the three towns even greater decreases (increasing the decrease in assessments by up to 12 times the current assessment) and the other three towns even larger increases. Under this option, Russell’s increase would grow from $194,664 to $698,285 and Huntington’s assessment would increase by over $90,000. Given that all six towns would need to agree to the alternative assessment method, it would be unlikely that Russell and Huntington would agree to this scenario.
We’ve also heard much discussion about using a five-year rolling average for assessments, even though this option is not currently outlined in the regional agreement; however, this option appears to make some sense. Two towns would see an increase over the existing method but still pay less than the current year (Blandford and Middlefield) while two towns would see higher assessments (Chester and Montgomery) over the current year. Huntington’s assessment would drop $68,231 from the current model but would still increase from the current year by $57,747 and Russell’s assessment would drop $74,285 from the current model but still see an increase of $120,379 from the current year. As we move forward through the next several weeks, I’m sure that we’ll see some ongoing discussions regarding this option.
The different assessments based upon these three methods of calculating individual town assessments can be found on the district website under school committee presentations. I hope that this will give everyone some detailed information to consider as we move forward in approving next year’s budget for the Gateway District.
