Board eyes 3.8% tax hike for 2020-21
POTTSTOWN » Current plans for the $65.8 million 2020-2021 Pottstown Schools budget call for a 3.8-percent tax hike.
The tax hike, the maximum allowed by the state cap, would help close a projected budget shortfall of $1,138,808, according to a presentation made by Business Manager Maureen Jampo at Thursday night’s online school board meeting.
In addition to the tax hike, the budget plan calls for pulling an additional $991,000 out of reserves to balance the budget.
Jampo said the borough lost another $2.2 million in assessed property value in the past year, siphoning off $105,000 in revenues from the next budget before calculations even began.
The coronavirus pandemic also has thrown a monkey wrench into the district’s budget plans.
Current projections call for earned income
tax revenues to be down by $220,000 over the current year.
Further, anticipating that cratering state tax revenues are likely to result in all state aid remaining flat, Jampo removed another $144,846 from basic education subsidy of the draft budget; as well as another $86,300 from the special education subsidy line.
On the upside, some costs which have dropped due to the March 13 closure of all Pennsylvania public schools have allowed the district to repurpose some budget lines to purchase additional Chromebook computers for students who don’t have them.
That removed those costs from next year’s budget, cutting another $85,000 in anticipated costs.
The school closure also will create additional reserves for the capital projects budget and PSERS retirement budget fund.
The latest budget draft also drops the 3 percent salary hike for administrators and support staff planned for next year by a percentage point, thus saving another $264,000.
The latest budget draft also delays a science curriculum adoption, saving $150,000; and a re-allocation of special education costs that will also help to reduce the coming year’s tuition payments to charter schools, said Jampo.
The board also voted to move forward with a refinancing of three years’ worth of bonds from 2013, 2015 and 2017 worth $13.5 million that is projected to save the district $200,000.
With those savings, and what he called “a very healthy fund balance,” board member Thomas Hylton, who heads the school board’s budget and facilities committee, questioned whether the full tax hike is necessary. In February, Hylton had said he had no plans to vote for a tax hike, but anticipated, correctly it seemed at the time, that the other board members were willing to support the 3.8 percent tax hike. He therefore proposed refraining from wasting administrators’ time by crafting budget scenarios that would be moot by the time it came for adoption in June. But the arrival of a viral pandemic has resulted in quite a few additional budget calculations in the administrative offices. Hylton said he is less sanguine about a tax hike now. “We had a good economy then. But we’re headed into a world-wide depression that is unprecedented, and you want to take a poor town and add another $1.1 million in taxes on them?” As it so often does in Pottstown, the budget discussion also touched rather heavily upon Pennsylvania’s unbalanced education funding system, which this year will underfund Pottstown schools of more than $13.8 million. “That money is going to other districts that have no problem with their budgets,” said board member Raymond Rose. Those districts are “saying let’s build a stadium and we’re agonizing on spending $100,000 in a $65 million budget. Our community and our children are getting shortchanged by the state,” he said. “Now is not the time to let up on advocating for fair funding,” said Rose, who suggested people interested in joining the fight visit the Advocates for Pottstown Education Facebook page for an online meeting about how to advocate for fairer funding.
This article first appeared as a post in The Digital Notebook blog.
The latest budget draft also drops the 3 percent salary hike for administrators and support staff planned for next year by a percentage point, thus saving another $264,000.