How to Vote on Your School District Budget

How to Vote on Your School District Budget

I want to come right out and state up front that both the Wantagh and Seaford School Districts’’ Budgets deserve your vote Tuesday, May 17.  It has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that rejecting a school budget results in no actual savings or tax reduction, but does cause needless harm to the students of the district and their parents, your neighbors.  However, I believe that it is vitally important for voters to show up and cast their votes—for or against the school budget-- to keep the process honest.

The balance of today’s blog will address the Wantagh School District Budget. 

While this budget does deserve your vote in support of its passing, the Wantagh budget is not what I consider to be a budget worthy of either the imprimatur, “Excellence”, or the, standard of “Rigor” so often bandied about the Wantagh School District. 

This budget is the result of a long and arduous process.  That means a lot of people, including the Board of Education, the Administration, the various school principals and department heads, as well as the Budget Advisory Committee (BAC) comprised of Wantagh voters, all worked long and hard to arrive at the result which, hopefully, the voters will approve. 

Endurance and hard work, while admirable, do not necessarily equate to excellence or rigor.  They yield consensus or something like consensus, and, compromise.  This is the best that everyone working on the Wantagh budget could do, by way of compromise and something like consensus.   Anyone should agree that compromise is a far cry from excellence, and that consensus does not even approach rigor.

How does the Wantagh budget stack-up?

Measuring a budget should not be done using the time-worn comparisons of either budget-to-budget increase, or, tax levy increase.  Here’s why:

• Budget-to-budget compares one flawed estimate of spending with another flawed estimate of spending, with the resulting comparison being doubly flawed.  Wantagh’s 2011-12 budget looks great when you compare Wantagh’s 1.46 percent budget-to-budget increase with Seaford’s’ for example.  But Seaford’s actual budget is actually much sounder than Wantagh’s budget, in my opinion.
• The only valid comparison of any budget would be to the prior year’s actual spending.  In the case of Wantagh, with a budget-to-budget increase of only 1.46 percent, the budget-to-actual increase is a whopping 8.8 percent!  That is hard to justify, given the declining enrollment in Wantagh.   Trust me, the budget-to-budget comparison is a meaningless exercise which can be misleading although comforting to voters.  Follow along, please:
  • 2011-12 Budget   = $70, 194.507
  • 2010-11 Budget   = $68,182,285 = 1.46 percent
  • 2009-10 ACTUAL = $64,532,027 = 8.77 percent

So, how can this be?   Well, the answer is that, although we are told that the budget is for spending, it really isn’t just for spending.  It is to justify taxing!  They don’t spend the budget, they use the budget to tax you, and then they hoard a large stash of your cash is something call the “fund balance”.

• 2009-10 Budget   = $67,494,030
• 2009-10 ACTUAL = $64,532,027
• Difference…………. $ 2.96 MILLION, budgeted, taxed, butnot spent on your kids!

In going through this year’s proposed budget, if you attempted to tie-out the numbers, you would find that there is a similar amount of bloat included, padding the budget—and your taxes—to build up this fund balance thing.  They do this for two purposes.

1. To have money ready to give employees raises, from the cleaners to the Superintendent
2. To use as a cushion against reductions in federal and state aid, so they can avoid making any real, tough, structural decisions necessary to balance state funding, taxes, and spending.  This is called kicking the can. (Seaford did NOT kick the can in their budget).

Why is the tax levy increase  not a reliable way to evaluate a school budget?

• The tax levy increase uses the flawed budget as its base, you know, the spending and the fund balance thing.  From the flawed budget, they subtract the state aid and other revenues which include rents, fees, and “appropriated fund balance”.  The result is the tax levy, which is not your taxes, but which is the total amount of tax to be collected and given to the school districts to spend and/or hoard.
• While the revenue budget may be shown to you in some brochure, it is not part of the school budget vote, and the school board is free to change it, especially the “appropriated fund balance” part which they control at their complete discretion.  In 2008, for example, while the school board promised to allocate $1.7 million from the fund balance as ‘revenue’ in the revenue budget, they reneged and pulled-back all of it, thereby increasing the tax levy by $1.7 million, which we all had to pay in the following year’s school tax.
• The actual tax levy mentioned in the school district advertising for their budget is a blend of four separate classes of property.  The levy get apportioned among those classes according to a formula prescribed by New York State, with each class being charged a different proportion, under the Base Proportion Adjustments.  Single-family homes are in Class One, which usually bears the highest proportion of the school tax rate.

So, when the school district advertises a tax levy increase of 3.99 percent that only means the total of all taxes  to be collected from homes, businesses and utilities will go up by that amount in aggregate.  Class One (single family homes) taxes will generally go up higher, and your own taxes will go up in relation to the assessed valuation of your individual property.

I want to close on my original premise: the Wantagh School District Budget, though flawed, does deserve to pass.  We accomplish nothing by defeating it.  So, even if you have to hold your nose, let me encourage your support of this year’s budget.  I think the kicking of the can will stop in Wantagh, next year!

Questions?  Ask Chris

Share Info: Tell Chris

Reader Mail:

Robert wrote and asked the following probative question:

"What can be done about unfunded mandates and unsustainable school employee benefits and soaring pension costs?"

Reply, Chris Wendt to Robert:
One way to look at this is that the total school tax levy is comprised of "mandates" that are NOT funded by some other source.
Of course, state funding of any 'mandate' uses your own money, they just take your money from the left pocket instead of the right pocket.
Federal funding of anything uses money that is borrowed from China, with interest; that borrowing, the national debt, gets repaid by money that comes out of your back pocket.

The biggest "mandate" is a local mandate, decided upon solely by the Board of Education: the salaries that they agree to pay everyone who works for the school district.
 
As far as medical benefits, the only thing that can be done, and the board just did this, is to increase the percentage of that cost required to be paid by employees and retirees.
 
Pensions are a different matter.  Those are protected by various laws and the state and federal constitution.  The only local control over pension cost goes right back to the very biggest mandate of all, how much money does the school board agree to pay employees.  Employee pay is the main determinant of the size of a person's pension.  The bigger the salary, the larger the pension.  Until there is a majority of the school board members thinking in terms of how salary give-aways impact pension costs and taxes, the pensions, salaries, and taxes will just keep right on soaring through the roof.
 
Thank you for writing, Robert.
Chris Wendt