District waiting for final revenue figures
The Board of Education of the Highland Falls-Fort Montgomery Central School District has started its annual task of going line-by-line through the proposed budget for the next school year.
Assistant Superintendent for Business Denise Cedeira made her first budget presentation to the board on March 7, although she has been working on it since November. She told the board she and her staff first went into the planning stages asking building principals and the directors of different areas of the budget to try to reduce their overall spending by five percent in the 2019-20 school year.
She reminded the board that it is “still a work in progress”.
The budget she presented is $31,967,156, a 4.4 percent increase in spending over the 2018-19 budget ($30,606,772). That’s up $1,360,382.
The tax levy increase projected — and, again, the number is preliminary because the school district does not yet have it’s final assessment roll to work off, nor is there a completed New York State budget in place yet with final aid numbers — is 2.92 percent. That is within the state’s mandated tax cap for the district.
The preliminary amount expected to be collected in taxes is $11,184,284. The tax rate increase is unknown at this time. However, in her early budget documents, Cedeira estimates local property owners would pay $21.75 per $1000 of assessed value in taxes. In the current school year the rate was $21.13 per $1000 of assessed value.
“We still have work to do on both the expenditure and the revenue side,” Superintendent of Schools Dr. Frank Sheboy said. “We have meetings with State Senator Skoufis this week and would love to get a sense from him as to where he thinks we will end up in terms of
revenue.”
He added that while the district’s maximum allowable tax levy increase is 2.92 percent to remain at or below the cap, “positive news in terms of state aid revenue may enable us to propose a budget a little below that”.
There are other figures, besides the local assessments and state aid, still to come in the budget preparation, including the amount the district will receive in tuition from West Point and Garrison students. Neither of those final figures will be known until the exact number of students attending O’Neill High School next year is determined. This year for West Point students the district received $5.3 million in tuition, and, per their contract that is expected to jump to $5.8 million in 2019-20. Garrison enrollment (46 students are expected at this point) is expected to increase from $560,130 to $703,755. Garrison currently pays $14,365 per student in tuition; that rate could change slightly for the next school year, too.
Final federal Impact Aid numbers for the next school year have also not yet been solidified. Impact aid compensates the school district for lost tax revenue due to federal land acquisition. The estimated amount that the HF-FMCSD will get in 2019-20 is $3,461,694.
What Cedeira and the board do know at this point in the process are these things:
• They are expecting the retirements of five long-time employees (three teachers, a nurse and a clerk) which ends up saving some money in salaries.
• They are budgeting for an additional groundsman/custodian, an additional clerical position, an additional second grade teacher, and an additional high school special education teacher.
• A new vehicle for the building and grounds department is in the budget.
Their work will continue through this month and April before the community will vote on a budget on Tuesday, May 21. The annual public hearing on the budget will take place on Thursday, May 9. School Board meetings, where the budget is discussed, are open to the public. The next one is Thursday, March 28.
“We understand our taxpayers are burdened,” Cedeira said at the meeting. “We try to be mindful of that.”
