Pelham Schools President Calls for Use of More Reserve Funds to Reduce Levy

Pelham school board President Robert Eicher called on administrators to incorporate more of the district's reserves to lower the tax levy as they continue tweaking their budget proposal for next year.

Eicher said the budget to budget tax levy increase associated with the district’s current $65.5 million proposal for the 2012-2013 school year needed to be lower during Monday's school board meeting. That proposal represents an increase of about 3.69 percent from this year’s budget and a tax levy increase of about 2.99 percent.

Angelo Rubbo, the district’s assistant superintendent of business services, said the proposal is probably in the fourth quartile, on the highest end of the spectrum, compared to other local school districts in to the budget to budget increase.

“Working with my peers, every school district is different,” Rubbo said. “I think over the next couple of weeks, we see what some of the other school districts are doing and there’s some significant impacts to school district and the programs that they are running.”

Rubbo said districts in the region have had tax levy increases ranging from 0 to 4 percent.

Board Member Margaret  O’Leary said information she received from the Westchester-Putnam School Board Association seemed to suggest that most school districts in the area had kept their tax levies at or below the state’s mandated 2 percent property tax cap.

Eicher said the Pelham school district has more flexibility than many other school districts because of the amount of money the district has remaining in its reserve accounts. He suggested that the district use more of those reserves to decrease the proposed tax levy.

The current budget proposal already is already relying on $500,000 from the reserve fund dedicated to employee retirement system to lower the tax levy.

“Right now the Pelham school district is among the best reserved school districts in the state,” Eicher said. “It’s part of the reason why our AAA rating is what it is....those funds are in the right places and we do have some flexibility in terms of the funds that are there for the reduction of an increase.”

Eicher said employee benefits and contracted salary increases  are the biggest factors driving up the budget. Employee benefits make up 2.34 percent of the proposed budget increases, while contractual salary increases make up about 1.11 percent.

Outside of having mass layoffs, Eicher said the only thing the district can do is rely on reserves for the next two years until contracts can be renegotiated.

“I do believe that we are going to have to get our tax [levy] increase much closer to what the average is going to be for Westchester County,” Eicher said. “So I think...we need to look at additional reserve utilization to get our increase closer to the average—this is the rainy day that past board have saved for in terms of being able to deal with, sort of, the unplannable situation, which is the 2 percent tax cap with a legacy collective bargaining agreement that is inconsistent with those numbers.”

Proposed budget adjustments

Rubbo also ran off a list of budgetary adjustments that have been proposed during the past few weeks.

Those adjustments include the inclusion of a full-time equivalent nurse at the cost of approximately $80,000. Rubbo said this addition won’t add to the budget since the district is expecting another nurse to retire. This move will allow the district to keep a nurse at all four elementary school buildings, since the new nurse will likely be brought in at a lower pay scale.

An increase of $12,742 has also been added to the budget for workers compensation insurance premiums and $5,000 has been added to increase internet bandwidth in the district and $10,000 to hire a junior local area network support technician. The rest of the budgetary adjustments can be seen in the PDF to the right of this story.

The PDF also has estimated tax increases for homes valued $500,000, $700,000 and $1 million.

The school board is scheduled to reach consensus on a budget during next week’s meeting on April 2 and is expected to adopted a budget on April 16.

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CORRECTION: The tax levy increase in the Pelham school district's budget proposal for 2012-2013 is 2.99 percent. An earlier version of this story said otherwise.