Archive: News

School Business Administrator continued her series of budget updates Monday for the Lansing Board Of Education.  King has been reporting on sections of the budget at each meeting so that board members can have the whole picture of the budget before they begin debating the 2011-2012 budget in earnest.  This week she attacked the co-curricular and extra-curricular portions, and updated the board on a projected gap between revenues and expenditures.

"The presentation I gave in October showed a budget gap of $2.7 million," King said.  "We're not far off of that now.  So we've been on the same page all along in terms of what we're projecting our budget to be."

In the co-curricular portion of the budget, salaries rise about 6%.  The biggest hit is in benefits, which are projected to rise 26%.  She predicted no rise in contractual obligations and materials and supplies for next year.  King said that amounts to an 8.5% rise overall, and amounts to about .63% of the total budget, accounting for a .02% rise from this year.

Extra-curricular expenses are about the same, with an 8.58% rise in salaries and 27.10% in benefits.  With equipment, conference, and other expenses the total extra-curricular budget would rise 10.33% which comes to 1.25% of the total budget.  This year extra-curriculars accounted for 1.19% of the total budget.

"In this instance we literally went person by person, coach by coach," she said.  "We moved them a step if that's what they would be doing contractually and recalculated based on the new salary increases that go into effect next year."

While the level of state aid is going down, the amount Lansing will be eligible for is slightly more than this year, $133,608 of a total of $6,600,311.

"The only reason that state aid is increasing is that the building aid for the Energy Performance Contract kicks in in the next fiscal year," King said.  "Our state aid is decreasing. it doesn't look like a significant decrease, but that is because we are projecting a bigger return on things like our transportation dollars, our excess costs of special education because we're doing a better job of filing that information now, and more BOCES state aid."

She said that Lansing's combined wealth ratio is decreasing, and that increases the amount of aid the state grants.

But the district will be losing $837,389 in federal aid and $722,041 in miscellaneous income.  There will be a slight rise in PILOT income, and a $208,460 increase in the tax levy is projected.

Board members discussed the impact of a sale of the AES Cayuga power plant, which is Tompkins County's and Lansing's largest taxpayer.  Board member Glenn Cobb predicted it will sell for less than its value, which will further reduce already drastic cuts in tax revenues as agreed to last year in a massively downwardly reduced valuation of the plant.  Superintendent Stephen Grimm said that value will be known next year.

"We can hope that number will be stabilized," he said.  "We can prepare for the worst.  It's a school problem because we're a taxing entity.  It shifts the burden onto taxpayers who have to pay school taxes.  The AES problem is part of the economic problem.  It's a reality for us because it's shifting it onto our taxpayers."

Rises in expenses and decreases in revenues are projected to create a $2,419,186 budget gap.  School board members will have to find ways to increase revenue or make cuts in the budget to make up for that gap.

Cobb asked whether the board could 'open up the box' by considering solutions such as merging with other school districts.

King says that for next year's budget the board can appropriate almost a million dollars from an excess fund balance and over a million from other funds to make up the gap.  That would deplete these reserves, especially if the board chooses to take $874,311 from the unappropriated fund balance, which would leave $96,562 in that fund.

Grimm said doing so will buy more time, hoping for an economic recovery that precludes massive cuts that could mean larger class sizes, fewer school bus runs, and a large shopping list of cuts that he said would be devastating.

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