The Budget Process

To explain a bit how we got here, how the budget process works, and what your responsibility as a taxpayer & voter is in this district.

First, let’s review the job of the School Board. They ultimately have two chief responsibilities:

1. Hire a superintendent

2. Approve a budget put forth by the superintendent 

They do also approve any incidental spending and contracts done over the course of the year. 

The budget is sent to the voters in the school district to approve in May.

For years, budget increases of greater than 5% were common here.

Two things changed that.

First, in 2012 Albany enacted the Property Tax Cap. The tax cap limits the amount that school districts can increase the tax levy from one year to the next to the lower of 2% or the rate of inflation. School districts can present a budget exceeding the set tax cap for a year, but such a budget can only pass with a supermajority of 60% of the electorate. The budget increases had already taken a hit as a result of the 2009 Recession; they continued to stay down.

Second, the 2017 Tax Cut & Jobs Act capped the amount that homeowners could deduct for State And Local Taxes (SALT). Whatever the merits of the policy, the intended effect was for taxpayers in high-tax states & with commonly high mortgage borrowing (such as ours) to be further restrained in local spending.

Grant that many of us in a high-tax region like Westchester County NY long ago bought into this system, which pays for the high levels of services we expect (beyond education, we do have admirable public transit, clean water, and the general high cost of salaries for the region etc). Still, money does not grow on trees. We need to understand the additional costs of excessive taxation.

1. Higher taxes means more money out of your pocket, obviously.

2. A higher baseline of taxes means continued higher taxes into the future. It is very rare to see taxes reduce in our area.

3. Higher taxes lead to an overall higher cost of ownership for your home, which is a factor in depressing sales prices in the future, since buyers would have to budget that into their monthly payments (along with other factors like higher borrowing rates).

Once again, it is understandable to want to pay “top dollar” for a quality education system.

But without any controls, the sky’s the limit. 

Here’s a simple example from a couple of years ago. At the budget meeting of March 2022, then-facilities head Joe Gramando remarked during the facilities budget review, referring to the high spending that year on heating oil usage:  “We would be saving a lot of oil if we aren't running these 24 hours/day.” This was news to many people.  How much oil? An estimated $90,000 more than the prior year. The pandemic might now seem fading in the distance by now... but the reality is, at the time even the CDC did not call for 24/7 ventilation. Somebody just assumed that money could be spent.

Where does the district intend to spend the money?

1. New Elementary Teachers to Reduce Class Sizes. Sounds great, right? But the timing is odd. Only two years ago, the district reduced the elementary school teachers by a count of 5, claiming that they’d need to add more during the pandemic.  A year ago, the district raided the reserve fund for elementary school to pay for... 2 School Resource Officers.
   
   

2. School Resource Officers. These are essentially armed police officers assigned to the schools and paid for by the school budget instead of the town budget. Last year, two officers.

Why does the school district need to pay $1M for salary & benefits for armed police officers? There is well-known fear in the country about school shootings. But they remain exceedingly rare, and rarer still in the Northeast. Moreover, the JAMA has reviewed the data and found that the presence of an armed guard increased the number of deaths by 2.83x.

Additionally, some people feel that police on hand can serve two roles: social work and active shooter defense. But, “they ain’t the same person”  the Atlantic recently wrote about the trials of Scot Peterson, the SRO at Parkland HS in Florida (“To Stop a Shooter”, February 2024): Most municipal police do not have the level of military training needed to confront, single-handedly, active shooter. It is merely for peace of mind, but at what cost?

There have indeed been local scares in the last several years when local students have made threats on social media. All of these were caught by parents, caregivers, and law enforcement well before any student showed up at school intending to carry out their threat.

The administration points back to a survey of some 7% of the electorate seemingly favoring this a year ago. But the survey -- like many such surveys in America -- didn’t ask respondents to consider the cost. 

3. Replenishing the reserves. Heavy borrowing in recent years has diminished the reserves, and this appears to threaten our ability to get favorable bond ratings for borrowing.
   
   

4. Discretionary consultants. There is very little transparency in the budget as to how much is spent on what consultants.. Per district policy, this information is retrievable via Freedom of Information (FOIL). Of course FOIL is really just a fallback mechanism for members of the public. A responsible board can request access to anything in the budget and get it without delay. Many residents are in the dark as to how much the consultant costs add up. 

One such example projected for the coming year is a potential realignment of the middle schools, putting grades 5-6 on one campus and 7-8 on another There was a study on this several years back -- which seems to be now lost. Perhaps much of it is still useful? And even more -- is this the right time to be spending money on new consultants?

Bottom line: We can’t spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need.

So, what will happen?

The Board is rolling the dice to see if this over-the-tax-cap budget gets the 60% approval.

if the tax cap breaking budget doesn’t pass, we would either default into a contingency budget situation, which would be at the same rate as the current year (i.e. no increase), and might necessitate draconian cuts – or the board would propose a different budget and call another vote a month later (in June). Most likely we expect they will come back to the negotiating table to put forth a budget that will pass.