A cut to the 5.72% school increase proposal seems sensible to some town officials — but nobody’s eager to be seen holding the knife.
People talked around the edges of it when First Selectman Rudy Marconi and Selectwoman Maureen Kozlark stopped into Tuesday’s finance board meeting.
“The 5.72% — we’re very, very concerned about it, just like everyone at this table,” Marconi said.
“But the superintendent did a very good job defending it,” he added.
“Eighty cents out of every dollar is spent by the Board of Education,” said finance board member Marty Heiser. That 80% includes paying off school construction borrowing, not just operating budgets. School operations — requested at $90.9 million — represent 65% of the total $140 million 2016-17 budget.
The budget projects to a 4.89% tax increase. The finance board has two means to reduce that: Cut spending, or boost non-tax revenue.
Finance board meetings are scheduled tonight, Thursday, March 31, and next Tuesday and Wednesday, April 5 and 6, all at 7:30 in town hall — some could be canceled.
The finance board made minor adjustments to revenue forecasts Tuesday, but the big item is “use of fund balance.” This finance board could dip into the town’s roughly $13-million surplus fund balance — reserves, something like a savings account — and use the money as non-tax revenue to offset spending and reduce taxes. For the current fiscal year, $1.85 million was budgeted to come from fund balance. Finance board policy is to maintain the fund balance at 8% to 9% of the budget total, and return the overage to taxpayers by using it as revenue, lowering taxes.
The selectmen usually make a “non-binding recommendation” on the school budget to the finance board — a charge given to the selectmen in a charter revision some years back.
But this year the selectmen opted to stay silent on that 5.72% school increase. They recommend, instead, that the finance board hold the tax increase under 3.5%. This is different from recommending a spending cut, since the finance board could also accomplish it by drawing on that $13-million fund balance.
Tuesday night finance board members questioned Marconi about this change of practice.
“By your non-binding recommendation to get to 3.5%, that’s what you feel the outcome should be?” asked Heiser. “…What you’re proposing is a $500,000 cut to the Board of Education.”
“It sounds like you’re upset we didn’t give you an actual number,” Marconi said.
Finance Chairman Dave Ulmer wondered if the selectmen planned to institutionalize this change in approach. “Are you going to the next Charter Revision Commission to ask for a non-binding recommendation on the mill rate?” he asked.
Kozlark liked that idea. “It makes more sense, for us,” she said.
Finance board members recalled that the selectmen pushed for the non-binding recommendation on school spending.
Marconi said it was because everyday taxpayers didn’t understand why the selectmen couldn’t control taxes: “ ‘What are you doing about the mill rate?’ They don’t know 66% of the budget is the Board of Education,” he said.
The non-binding recommendation was a charter revision compromise.
“We talked about binding, and it was emphatic: No one wanted the Board of Selectmen to have any kind of say on the Board of Education,” Marconi recalled.
Still, the “non-binding recommendation” generates discussion — it could share responsibility for a possible school cut.
That’s an issue because cutting the education budget carries the potential to anger school parents — one of the town’s more organized voting blocks.
The concern was clear Tuesday night.
Marconi said to Heiser: “You called me and said ‘I want you to know I’m 100% behind you when you cut the school budget.’ I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, Marty.”
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