By James Lomuscio
After two hours of debate and public input, Westport’s Board of Finance tonight approved by a 4 to 3 vote the Board of Education’s proposed $109,202,984 operating budget for 2014-15.
The budget presented by Elaine Whitney, school board chairwoman, represents a 4.2 percent increase over the current year, and it is $1.8 million less than Schools Superintendent Elliott Landon’s $110.8 million budget initially submitted to the Board of Education.
A motion by finance board member Tom Lasersohn to cut the budget by $200,000, which he described as “one quarter of 1 percent,” was defeated by a 5 to 2 vote. Lasersohn made the motion, challenging the school board “to find that money without affecting programs.”
For the past few months health insurance costs have overshadowed school budget process due to what was described initially as a $2 million health insurance fund shortfall in the 2013-14 budget blamed on unexpected, exorbitant claims.
Monday, however, that shortfall was revealed to be a $293,000 surplus. The reasons: thousands of dollars in positive variances in the board’s health account over the past couple months, as compared to its projections based on surprisingly negative variances last year, the driver of the deficit.
Prior to tonight’s finance board meeting, the school board in a closed session reduced its adjusted budget of Landon’s, $110.3 million, to $109.2 million due to a projected reduction in the health insurance adjustments for next year.
Brian Stern, finance board vice chairman, took issue with this fact, saying he and others had not received a printed copy of the changes to review.
“I still want a copy of what’s being proposed,” Stern said. “This puts us in a hard position.
“We started off with the issue of $2 million, and that’s changed a number of times,” he added. “It just makes me nervous when numbers fly around on healthcare.”
As a result, Stern said he was prepared to discuss the rest of the operating budget, excluding health insurance costs, about $15.4 million. Others, however, countered that it would leave too big a hole in the budget.
Board of Finance Chairman John Pincavage seemed sympathetic in light of the health insurance debacle.
“We got sandbagged last year,” Pincavage said, noting that the finance board should have had known last March what it did not discover until months later. “I got burned once and will not get burned again.”
Landon stressed that while “we have no certainty as to what these numbers (insurance claims) will hold,” the school board should maintain a 5 to 10 percent risk corridor in its reserves.
In an unusual turn, PTA Council Co-President Sheila Flynn noted that her group did not support the school board’s new budget. She said the Board of Education had cut too much.
“We suport Dr. Landon’s original $110 million budget,” Flynn said.
As the evening progressed, support for the board’s eleventh-hour budget came from finance board members Michael Rea, Janis Collins, Jennifer Tooker and Lee Caney. But that support was not without suggestions.
Rea, for one, asked that the Board of Education work with the finance board on “long-term strategic planning” to discuss multi-year operating budgets, so that the Board of Finance would know what to expect.
I congratulate Tom Lasersohn for bringing up a very importnat issue we all need to think about. Let me explain.
Tom presented that it costs Westport $20,000 per student. For a household of the typcial 2 children, that house costs Westport $40,000. Add in the Westport town costs, and a typical home in Westport costs $48,000 to the town. With an average home worth $1.5 million and the tax rate, a typcial home is taxed $18,000. So, this typical house generates a negative $30,000.
To make the financial numbers work, 2 out of every 3 homes in Westport do not have a student in our schools. 67% of the homes in Westport, as presented by Tom, have no children in our schools. They are parents or grandparents of Westport families that stayed long after their children left our schools. Or others that decide to move to Westport.
But that is where the issue needs to be addressed—what happens if these people who have no children in town schools decide to leave Westport. Say they want to avoid the high taxes in Westport, and lets be honest, the high CT state taxes. And now lets say when they move away, these homes get occupied by the typical 2 child family.
Evenetually the math does not work. More students enter our schools, at a lose to the town, and eventually taxes will have to rise a lot to offset those that left town that had no children in our schools. Remember they paid about $18,000 and get $8,000 in services.
There is no doubt our schools are wonderful and one of the main reasons people move to Westport. No doubt. And we need our schools to be the best for our chlidren, and lets be honest, the value of our homes. If you look at Westchester, where many have moved to Florida, their schools are not doing well and the taxes extremely high.
What Tom was telling us all, we need to be prudent with our budgets, both the town and schools. You need only to look at Fairfield or Bridgeport to understand what happens when costs drive poeple away.
I congratulate the work everyone did to drive our costs down. We should never lose sight of it.
We not only owe it to those that have children in our schools, but the 67% of the homes that do not. If our town taxes get to the point where we drive away those with no children in our schools, we could face ever increasing taxes and become Westchester.
I thank Tom for speaking to this issue.