By Jennifer Eisenbart
EDITOR
The preliminary 2014-15 budget for the Burlington Area School District is set.
That didn’t happen without one last protest by a member of the BASD School Board Monday night, though.
By a 6-1 vote, the board set the budget for the August annual meeting, with a tax levy mill rate increase of about 3.7 percent.
That works out to $11.56 of taxes per $1,000 of equalized property value. The district is also using fund balance dollars to balance this year’s budget mainly because of startup costs for the 4-year-old kindergarten program.
The lone dissenting vote came from Roger Koldeway, who asked for the numbers to be clarified – specifically, what the mill rate would have been if the district hadn’t levied for referendum-approved debt.
BASD Business Administrator Ruth Schenning said at the meeting that the mill rate, instead of having a 3.7 percent increase, would have had a .5 percent decrease.
Koldeway then called the situation a “shell game,” and that the district was using the referendum-approved debt dollars – which it hadn’t had to levy for in the past few years – to get past the state limit on tax increases.
Fellow board member Larry Anderson countered by saying that the start-up costs for 4K were resulting in the use of fund balance dollars, and added Tuesday that declining enrollment was playing a huge part in the district’s tax levy.
“The big problem for us is the continuing drop in enrollment,” Anderson said in an email, adding that the district is losing about 80 students a year.
And while the district will be able to address those costs in future years through additional state aid from 4K and also through possible cost reductions by shuttering a school building, for this coming year, the district has to make up for the loss in state aid.
“Thus I can’t get hung up with reasonable planned fund balance reductions in the next several years,” said Anderson in the email, adding that Koldeway was attacking this year’s budget and not looking long term.
Koldeway pushed the issue on Monday night, though, saying the district has not addressed the budget by each and every line item, and also is ignoring its increase in post-retirement benefits costs.
The second of those concerns has been addressed by the district, with the district holding a special meeting in March that included a CPA and a benefits specialist. Those representatives said only about a quarter of districts in the state have the money to put aside for future costs.
When Koldeway asserted the budget hadn’t been reviewed stringently enough, though, fellow board member Jim Bousman asked to hear Koldeway’s solution – and also pointed out that bringing up the issue in June wasn’t appropriate.
Koldeway replied that he had brought it up before, but he declined to go through and list the “several items” he thought the district could reduce costs on.
-
-
-
-
-