Board of Finance Supports 4% Tax Increase

In a discussion about next year's town budget, Board of Finance members said they could accept a 4 percent tax increase and roughly a $293,000 cut in the Board of Education's $80 million operating budget.

That would bring the mill rate from its present $12.20 per $1,000 of assessed value for property taxes to $12.68, the board and Kathleen Buch estimated.

The board will wait days to try to get firmer estimates of some budget lines before setting the Board of Finance budget, which will go to the Representative Town Meeting for a final decision in May.

The cut to the budget "is going to force thinking about what the priorities are" on the part of that board, said Jon Zagrodzky, a member of the Board of Finance.

Mao: School board can squeeze out unnecessary spending

Liz Mao, chair of the Finance Board, repeated a statement she made at the previous board meeting last week, that the Board of Education was able to quickly come up with $479,000 in cuts in the past year when it discovered it was spending money too fast, with unexpected, added costs of special education.

Board of Education Chair Elizabeth Hagerty-Ross said the money cut by the Finance Board "would come out of the new initiatives" that the school board had decided to fund this year.

Mao said that the cut in the budget was only a fraction of 1 percent. "I think that you can probably find it. [...] Look in the same places where you found the $479,000."

Hagerty-Ross later countered that the Board of Education had deferred spending on a number of projects and maintenance tasks that were now being delayed by multiple years.

Mao later said that while the Board of Finance wasn't trying to tell the Board of Education where to cut its budget, she herself had questioned last December whether the school board should be spending money on a new language program when money was so tight for so many taxpayers.

Darien Public Schools had received a 6.7 percent budget increase last year. After that increase, Mao has said the town deserved some breathing room from Board of Education requests for more money. Instead, it got another request for a similar spending hike, she said.

Softening the blow

Special education costs, which have been rapidly rising, are a major, unpredictable factor in the Board of Education's budget, and one that the town is mandated to spend money on, by state law. The Board of Finance had already set aside about $100,000 in a reserve account to pay for unexpected increases in special education spending for the next fiscal year.

On Tuesday night, the board decided to add about $96,000 that the town is about to receive back from the state as a special education reimbursement. If the Board of Education needs more money for special education due to unforeseen cost increases—such as a special education child moving into the school system—then the Board of Finance would be reasonable about granting the money, Finance Board members said.

The Board of Finance actually cut an estimated $441,867 from the school budget. But school district recently received a windfall of $150,000 in money that had been paid into the Other Post Employment Benefits (OPEB) account for retirees, but which accountants found wasn't necessary. That money will be turned back over to the Board of Education. So the effective cut was actually $291,867, according to the Board of Finance.

Small proportion

Mao pointed out that the amount of money cut was trivial compared with the Board of Education's overall budget, just above $80 million.

The town side of the budget received no additional cuts at the Board of Finance meeting. Some cuts had already been made in the town budget, but it contained no new initiatives, as First Selectman Jayme Stevenson pointed out to the board.

Altogether, the Board of Finance had reduced the requested budgets by about $2.2 million, although much of that was due to a windfall in reduced bonding costs and a lower increase in health insurance costs than had been expected, Buch said.

Correction: The school district received a 6.7 percent increase when the RTM passed the 2011-2012 budget last year, not 6 percent as originally reported.