In Kenny Rogers classic “The Gambler,” he sings “Cause every hand’s a winner and every hand’s a loser,” and that’s about the best way we can describe the school budgeting season this year.
First, we were facing an increase of $72 per $100,000 of assessed value, before the Common Level of Appraisal trued up all our homesteads. Then the House announced plans to remove the 5% cap on tax increases from Act 127. Act 127 is designed to help some districts increase their taxation yield to help pay for students who are costlier to educate. But increases to some districts’ taxation capacity obviously reduces other districts’ capacity.
Now, with H.850, legislators are proposing to provide districts that lose taxing capacity with 100% of their lost taxes in year one, 80% in year two, 60% in year three, etc. until 2029.
For our district that means a non-capped education tax rate of $1.78, which drops to $1.69 with a nine-cent reduction reflecting our lost 9% of taxation capacity.
A $1.69 tax rate means increase of 30 to 40% across the district based on each town’s Common Level of Appraisal. After those numbers came out, Harwood Unified Union School District superintendent Dr. Mike Leichliter and finance director Lisa Estler scrambled to present the Harwood board and community with budget scenarios that reduce the $50.8 million budget in a variety of ways, including some as draconian as cutting 26 FTEs as well as cutting planned contributions to the town’s maintenance reserve fund of $1.53 million.
As a district, we’re concurrently facing a need to update Harwood Union and a $70 to $90 million bond is potentially coming this fall. If that gets pushed off to next year, we’re still faced with $14 million in work that must be done in our district in the next few years.
If we cut staffing that drastically, we impact student learning. If we don’t put money aside for maintenance, we fall even further behind as a district.
That’s the part where every hand’s a winner and every hand’s a loser.
Act 60/68 is broken. So is Act 127 and now H.850. The Legislature needs to dismantle our ed funding system and start over.
