School Board asking City Council to back away from $50k budget cut

LACONIA — Responding to Councilor Henry Lipman's request that the School District look at cutting $50,000 from its proposed 2014-2015 budget, members of the district's Budget and Personnel Committee decided on Tuesday to send a letter to the council explaining that while they can do it, the cuts they have already made to stay within their initial property tax cap allocation are already hurting the schools.

The committee said they will reiterate that in order to meet the parameters of the tax cap — which allowed for a $568,000 maximum increase — meant eliminating $517,000 worth of planned expenditures from their initial budget draft because mandated line item expenses that must be included in next year's budget were up by $1.2-million.

The $1.2-million in "beyond the school district's control" includes contractual employee raises, health insurance increases, increased federally-mandated special education costs, increases in contributions to the state retirement fund and other similar items.

To eliminate $517,000 from the proposed budget the district cut a math teacher at the high school, an English teacher at the high school, a guidance counselor at the middle school, a special education teacher at the high school, a media specialist at Woodland Heights Elementary School, and one full-time and one part-time English as a second language teachers. Three full-time specialists were reduced to part time.

Business Administrator Ed Emond said he suggested to the City Council last week that he was cautiously optimistic that he could add $50,000 to the projected revenue line, noting that he slightly under-estimated the school adequacy revenue from the state and Medicaid revenue in the initial proposed budget.

Such an addition would have the same net affect on the total amount to be collected in property taxes as a like cut in planned expenses.E

Emond also noted the suggestion was not warmly received by most of the City Council members who seemed to want a $50,000 cut from the expenditure side. Emond noted that Ward 6 Counciler Armand Bolduc supported the school budget as presented while those that wanted to see an additional $50,000 cut from it were led by Ward 3 Councilor Henry Lipman.

Emond explained to the committee that if the $50,000 was added to the revenue side the district will have more flexibility as to where it makes its cuts should the revenue not materialized. He also said the city's tax rate goal would be met either way.

Committee Chair Scott Vachon agreed with Emond but said if the council insists on $50,000 from the expenditure side, the district should not target any specific line items but simply agree to reduce the budget and let Emond massage the line items.

Vachon noted that the City Council has no right to micro-manage the budget through budget line items and he's fairly sure that's not the city's intention.

The requested budget for the 2015-2016 budget is $36,293,552 up from $34,967,696 for this year. The proposed amount to be raised by local taxes plus the state-wide property tax for education support is $22,234,344 up from the 2014-2015 amount of $21,680,004 or $554,340.

The School District is scheduled to meet with the City Council around 8 p.m. Monday after the public hearing on the entire proposed city budget that begins at 7 p.m.