001I call me to order. We have six board members present. Please stand and salute the flag. Can I have a motion for the abolishment of the building grounds? Position? Any next to the second? You want to do them all together? Works for me. And I'll do the abolishment position of building grounds, the creation of position director of facility two, appointment of the director of facility two, approval of contract of director of facility two, MOA with the BTA and the BAA. I have a motion then for F. I'll move it. Is there a second? I'll second. Any questions? Why is it called facilities two? Civil service says it's a civil service and it allows the individual to be much more hands on. This is a director of building grounds position was more of a I won't
002say a desk job, but that wouldn't be fair to it, but that would be more of a person working in the field. So, it's civil service title. Just the Roman numeral two means something. Um, I'm not sure I'm following. Yes, there's one, two, and three are the New York State titles and I think three is more of a high level laborer who has some supervisory um, responsibilities. Director two is hands on, but supervises people, and then one would be more of a lower cycle. >> [laughter] >> I know it's specific certification they have to have test for to have that. Okay, motion is approved. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? I'm a aye. Motion carried. Now we're moving to the 26.7 public budget presentation. Just kind of hold it down, Colleen. Perfect. >> [laughter]
003>> Yeah, if you scoot a little bit over this way, I can show the screen and you. So, that's great. Good morning. And welcome to the 2016-2017 budget hearing. The purpose of a budget hearing is to inform the community about the proposed budget before the May 19th budget vote. The budget dollar amount and funding plan were approved by the Board of Ed on April 21st and will not change. A budget is a spending plan based on current projections and district needs may change throughout the year. Our adopted budget is 26,799,000. The previous year, the budget was 26, which is our current as well. 26,266,000. And that is a year-over-year difference of 533,000 dollars. Which equals a 2.03% increase, which is lower than the consumer price index. There's our tax levy calculation, which is at the
0042% limit. And for us, that equals a 2.16 increase year over year and $235,000 decrease year. This slide has been up here for a few different presentations. It is our levy over time, and then at the bottom you'll see some comparisons to other local levies. So, the last time I put this slide up there were 18 districts reporting with an average increase of 3.52, and there were 14 districts that were higher than Berlin, and three districts that were lower than Berlin. Again, our levy is a 2.16% and we're looking at the dollars per the dollar per thousand assessed value is $23.16, or an increase of 38¢ per thousand. Then there are a couple numbers below it in the box there where you can kind of multiply up or down if you're thinking about your own
005property. However, we do have some differences in equalization in our district. Um one of the community presentations we were discussing this with the group, Berlin has not had a reassessment since 1980, and I understand um two of our towns have just reassessed. So, Berlin's numbers in particular won't be reflecting this up here because the assessments are so old. This is our funding plan. So, our levy is at $11,109, or $9,000, and our state aid is $13,929,000. Our other revenues are $711,000, which leaves us with a $1.8 million deficit. Our plan to close that deficit is to use the maximum allowable for worker's comp, maximum allowable for unemployment, maximum allowable for ERS, and portion of our TRS money, and our $1 million in appropriated fund balance, which we are carrying in current year budget, but don't
006anticipate using. So, that will roll over to fund the next year's budget. Um in my in our last meeting presentation, we talked a little bit about what this means. So, I would recommend for our district, if we get to the point where we need to use this money, we would first use the workplace top. Our billing each year is about 55,000 for our third-party management company, mainly, and that's $621,000. That will last quite some time. Same thing for unemployment, I would use that as well. If our quarterly billing is about 10,000, equaling 40,000 in a year, and our reserve is 580,000, that will last some time. When I keep saying that we have a 3-year window, the reason mainly is because of what's left in our ERS reserve. That is our largest reserve. It allows
007us to close this budget gap. Without it, we could not close this budget gap. Um but, if we were to use that ERS money, we would then only have 3 years or less in that reserve. What changes in our budget include the next slides will show some additions, reductions, and reorganizations. We're going to add a math teacher. There was a half-time math position in the current budget. It was really more of a half-time increase to our budget. That was not filled, but this current year we plan to use that role to reduce our extra assignments for our teachers, and to increase in this math academic intervention, as well as meeting some of our new financial literacy mandates. >> As many know, we do not have a librarian at the elementary school this year. So, we
008hope to reorganize that role. So, the librarian will be shared between the two buildings. And to support that, we'll add Follett School Library Automation, which is described in the boxes below, to lighten some of the workload that librarians do between the two buildings. The service includes things like technical support with inventorying and managing the library learning and collection. I do want to add that due to the math teacher being added, that's going to allow the librarian position to be added. So, if we didn't add the math teacher, we would not be able to have a librarian. I know that's kind of confusing how they're related. It's due to certification. We have a We have a teacher who's dual certified, and because of that math addition, that's going to allow the the librarian at the elementary
009school to be there for half the day. We have no librarian right now. So, it's another reason why we're hoping to process that addition of the math teacher. But, yeah, the AIS services for the librarian also meets state mandates as well. We're going to bring pre-K in house. One of the upfront costs is that 20,000 of furniture that's been on those lines for some time. We did confirm that the existing furniture is BOCES owned. So, we do need to make that purchase to get our program started. And we will be replacing the furniture with similar furniture to what was there now, the hard furniture. Why bring pre-K in house? The largest financial savings at the bottom there, you'll see it says financial benefit of 40,000 plus. That's the minimum save or the minimum benefit that
010we expect to have. If more children enroll, each student would bring an additional $10,000 benefit. If one of the employees who we calculated does not take a family plan, that will also be an additional benefit. So, that's the a that we expect. Um we will also have greater control of our curriculum. We'll be able to include those teachers in more of our conference days, professional development, coaching with our um with our the rest of our team, really. We'll be able to collaborate and evaluate those people. Plus, we already provide all the classroom space, library, and cafeteria, supervision, music, gym. All those things are no extra expense to us because they're already using our spaces. Other items that are new or revisited in this budget, um unified sports that did occur in the current school year.
011It wasn't in the original 25-26 budget, but it is also now included in the 26-27 budget. It was kind of like later in the year addition. We have a new weight room equipment replacement. That's mainly the treadmill that is expected to not pass certification testing. We are adding an intramural soccer program. And we need to renew our literacy curriculum at the elementary school. There's also a new election reporting software because of some new reporting requirements. And some topics that came up last year that I wanted to let the public know about, we are going to continue to send the students who are enrolled in STEM high school already. They will finish out their time there. And we have accepted all All acceptances to the new vision students are funded in this budget. And we will
012continue our literacy learning program in head start. We talked a little bit about bringing mowing, um field maintenance, and plowing in house. So, we are going to It is in this budget because the budget number cannot change after the board approves the budget number. The board wishes to hold off on putting these funds until the incoming director who was just [clears throat] hired tonight can make some recommendations about our purchases and how that might work. The same goes for the the hiring of the groundskeeper who may or may not be needed depending on what that work looks like. We did mention that the director of facilities is a more hands-on role, and so we'll see where our workflow looks like when we find the inefficiencies. Budget reductions. So, we are moving to a Monday through
013Thursday only model for our late bus bus run. Someone in our community presentation said, "Well, how does that affect sports?" It does not affect sports. That's a separate run in our budget. >> [clears throat] >> Advisors, we're going to reduce seven or more of the stipends, and they are going to be the ones that are least impactful to the students. We've reduced some instructional software. We looked at special education and reduced some of the contingency funding. What that means is if we get a student who loses to the district, or we have a tuition that is higher than anticipated, we have to look throughout our budget for money to move. There's not planned extra money to do those emergencies there. So, we'll have to look at other underspent lines a little more closely. Um we've
014also moved any discretionary funding um expenses, I should say, to the grant, such as conferences, materials, and that's what we balance the budget with. Other reductions. So, we had some reduced equipment. We reduced that equipment in order to afford that truck now. We had some reduced materials contracts and software both in administration general as well as in the business office, in facilities. We added an additional telephone service for our fire lines, our fax lines, the analog lines, which will lead to some savings. And we are bringing some of those beginning-of-the-year human resource trainings and safety trainings in-house with our policies um person helping us think through our students here once a week. In the technology department, I had mentioned that our Merit IT overall, the bundle that was included came in at a lower dollar
015rate than originally anticipated in the 25 26 planning cycle. And we've also continued to reassess our Odyssey of the program and there are some contract savings because the repair of some of the network services that were separately budgeted are now included in the married service and those no longer need to be budgeted. And we're looking at reorganizing our technology Our deficit history and our revenue growth. The deficit has grown by about $221,000 from last year to this. And again, this is money that we don't anticipate hitting in the 25 26 school year, so that 1 million will continue to roll over. We don't anticipate pulling from the reserves this year, so that 1.8 is 1.6 of it is unused from the prior year. You can kind of forget it like that. Um nonetheless, we still
016need to look at reducing and stabilizing so we don't continue to even close that gap on paper because when we're closing it on paper, that very likely means we're not funding things like our capital reserve and there's a greater risk that we actually will be pulling down on that. So over time, what we hope to see is our revenues and expenses matching and eventually our revenue I mean in a couple hundred thousand above expenses would be nice because that would allow us to take our taxpayers tax levy and fund the capital reserve for lower tax impact than that time comes where we need capital projects. That is the goal. We looked at our historical expense and revenue to kind of look at how did we get to such a large gap and through our many
017budget discussions we've talked about in COVID funding years and some of the misunderstandings about board meeting, grant funds with general funds that led us to this moment. You can see along the bottom some of the very large increases year to year over those COVID years and then that last area where about 600,000 in reductions occurred. These are the more recent years, a close-up of that so you can see there's a great escalation during the COVID funding years, but we have been working on our corrective action. With our leftover budget, in the coming year we do expect to see somewhat of a spike because if you remember this year we saved about 450,000 in unfilled roles and salaries, so we know that those are going to be filled right away. And we know also that our
018health insurance is 300,000 plus, so we would expect to see a spike this year. Unless again we have some unfilled roles or some other unexpected occurrences. Our current budget year status. Right now, according to all our encumbrances in the general fund, it still looks like we will end at about 24 million or 250,000. In any budget you should have 3 to 5% contingency funds throughout each line. The remainder that don't get spent from each line, and that amount will be in the 1 million dollar range. So when people look at our 26 million dollar budget over the current year, and they say, "Well, well if you have that much money left, is it too big of a budget?" And no, it is not. Had we filled those 450,000 worth of roles, we would have been
019very and not had these other savings with the telephone and taking some things that we planned for the general fund and putting them in grants or we would have been within that range. So that was realistic budgeting. I think on one of my previous slide it said, "Um if I take these numbers and compare them to what I thought at the time of budgeting, at most it was a 1% difference in budgets." So you could say, "Oh, I over budgeted by 1% based on these facts." Our opening budget for the coming year is that 36 million 799,000. If I had to set a goal right now, you know, >> [cough] >> many months ahead, what might happen, what might not happen, a good target, I think, for us would be around between 5,350,000 with an
020estimated contingency of around a million plus, let's say. So, if we're able to stay within that target, we would then use 400,000 of our reserves in fund balance. The recommendation at this time, as I said, will be reserve sliding, that we will purchase four more business town and unemployment, and then fund balance to preserve our ERS and PRS funding, because those are the largest gap with weak potential. So, why might we underspend that budget? Well, first, we have our planned contingency across the whole budget, that million dollars or so. We may find additional pre-K savings, as I said, for every student that comes on board beyond those we know we have now, we will get additional 10,000 savings. Our family plans are budgeted for four staff members at $30,000, so if one of them takes
021a single or a couple plan, there will be additional savings there. We're continuing to track our utility savings. We're going to look into the fuel. Uh, we're looking at the possibility of in-house mowing, but that's on hold. We'll see what the director of facilities recommends. And if any of those roll either temporary or for a longer time on hold, that could be additional savings. So, it is possible that we could land there. I can't promise that, but it's possible. So, there's our target again for this coming year. Um, and I already said we need to save We would hit about 400,000 in our reserves and fund balance. And the idea is to preserve those ERS funds, that would again allow us to lengthen our window to 3 years. If we hit that number, if we
022go beyond that number, we may then pull more from reserves, and that could reduce the window. So, deficit reduction in any area of expenses targeted should just to be clear, be achieved by deferring planned maintenance and should not be achieved by deferring equipment rotation. The district needs to assess and stabilize our true annual cost. And as we know from our previous discussions, this is one of the things that piles up and leads us to inaccurate budget numbers. So, we really have planned this budget so we will be able to do two or three significant maintenance projects as is the case in this current year, and we should continue to do that to keep ourselves on track and just show the true year-to-year costs. We are also replacing a room of desks and ordered some chairs
023and desks for the storage. We got some new cameras this year for our department. We're looking at a couple of other things to see if we can achieve them by the end of the year, but that's the kind of thing that should be happening in the next year as well, so that we really are showing realistic costs and are taking care of our needs in an educational manner. So, sort of our our financial status at this moment, the expected fund balance of 4% for the coming year would be just over a million, million and 71,000. We still have the excess fund balance, which is the amount above the 4%, which is 565,000 dollars. That amount, again, was preserved in case something occurs with some of our capital needs, and that would at least allow us
024to have some temporary mitigation. If we are able to have a capital project sometime in the next year, then that money could be used to replace reserves, it could be used to fill a budget gap. So, we would have a need for it in other areas as well. Right now, we're using it for some insurance. Our capital outlay in this budget, again, is 75.4% payable, and our plan is to address the middle school high school auditorium doors. As we to to plan with the architects. They may either replace the hardware or they may replace the door. We'll look at what we can fit in that budget. If money remains, water fountains that we have is when we consider it an alternate. And by putting that as an alternate, it allows us to add those water
025fountains. If you do not state that it's an alternate, then we couldn't do it at all. So, we may be able to do it if funds remain. If the doors take up all the money, it will not No. So, we can do it later on time. And finally, our annual bus proposition, which has no real budgetary impact, is just as one bus is paid off, we buy some new ones and we are rotating our bus inventory as we should do with our other equipment in the district. A maximum cost of $355,000. And any old buses, this has been a question as well, that do come off that are all that are aged out, we sell them as scrap metal or we auction them and that money comes in as revenue in the general fund budget.
026I don't believe there are any plan sales this year, but in 2025-2026 there were or plan sales that added to our revenue. The electric bus mandate is still something that's floating out there. We do have the ability to have a 2-year waiver until 2029. And we do not know where we'll land on that. They are telling us that after the waiver period, it is possible that we continue to purchase diesel buses, but there will be a penalty such as not receiving state aid for those. We can then speak with some of the superintendents and mention that it's possible they won't accept the diesel buses anymore. So, we don't know exactly what the penalty will be, but at this moment, uh bus and the electric bus mandate still stands. Yeah, and at least 2034 for full
027conversion. Yes. Still stands as well. So, that's creeping up. And that brings us to the conclusion of our budget hearing. Are there any questions? Can you please sit down? All right. >> [laughter] [cough] >> Are there any questions for Colleen or myself regarding the budget? Um I have a couple questions. Um so if somebody's looking at this budget from Keeseville and their assessed value of their property is about to $400,000 what are they looking at for for what they're going to be paying in taxes versus what maybe Steven Town is? I think a lot of you don't understand equalization rate including myself really. Um but [clears throat] just in terms of Mhm. You know, looking at this like what, $23.16 per thousand assessed value. Is that kind of averaged out over all the towns? It
028is averaged out over all the towns each year. Um usually in the summer the state releases those equalization rates so I can't actually calculate them now. I can calculate them based on last year but we already know those are going to be completely wrong because we just had two major reassessments. So they'll send out whatever they have deemed the proportional [clears throat] value and the total tax bill will get divided amongst the towns in proportion based on their total assessed values. But when towns are reassessed and I think we talked about this during our community meetings it does not mean the district gets to collect even a penny more. It only has to do with the distribution of the allowable tax calculation. You do not get any more money for reassessments. So, basically, it's going
029to be a surprise in August when the state sets the rate. We don't know what it's going to be. Yes. Is it lagged one year or two? Yeah, Berlin will be the one that has a larger impact cuz it has not been reassessed. They have to sort of guess about what the equalization of the proportional value will be. But, the state is the one that decides the equalization rate. Yes. Okay. Okay. Um and so, the capital outlay project, it looks like you you've nixed the lockers altogether. Yes. It was just too expensive. Yes, it was. Okay. Yeah, just to give that just so Katie understands as well, but the initial thinking was to uh replace the lockers in the back hallway of the building, those high school the blue lockers. Uh we planned to uh
030try to replace as many as possible for our population of students. The quote anything those came over 400-plus dollars per locker would have been about $83,000. So, it would have eaten up the entire budget essentially for the capital outlay. So, some may ask, "Well, okay, well, why not just do it then? They're ugly, they're old, they're broken, and whatever." The bigger challenge is going to be a safety issue. Safety is going to come first for our students. The safety issue concern is doors that don't lock properly or don't lock at all, and the hardware broken on them. So, we are addressing the safety aspect first and and prioritizing that over something that's more aesthetic at this point. And as Holly mentioned, we do have a little bit of possible we're going to do the bathrooms
031as well. We couldn't There's no way to put in the lockers as well at this point in time. So, it's something we'll keep on our radar for the future and consideration, but the cost was just something that we didn't expect to have to have that much. So, it was replace or repair these doors. So, I'm assuming that we're just repairing and changing out locks. The mechanisms then. You should definitely have enough for water fountains. Yes, based on the quotes have seen so far, I will do so. Nothing's written in stone until we actually get the final comparison. Um and then just for the electric bus mandate, um when you said there's a possible 2-year waiver, what does that mean by a possible 2-year waiver? Oh, it's If I said that, then it was a mis-
032poor choice of words. There is a 2-year waiver, which we surely will fill out and continue to as long as we are able to. So, we uh should make this in July. Janette and I work on those study after answer survey questions about your community. You're basically showing the state that you are still exploring um the possibility of of having these these buses, looking at things like, you know, your geography, your infrastructure. So, you complete the survey, we we complete that study, then you're able to get the waiver extended each year. So, we like most districts around us have have the waiver, we're able to continue that waiver. But at some point, if the waiver does get pulled, obviously, we'll be mandated to actually purchase um you know, electric buses. And then, right now, again,
033it still stands at 2034. And right now, this sounds like what I'm what I'm hearing other superintendents are hearing right now is this isn't a game where the governor is planning on backing down right now. There there's a lot of school districts that are either mostly urban or urban that are do find positive results in the communities, you know, find it's working. So, the the the uh the governor is planning on pushing for school districts. 20 times though, um it's not something that I would certainly certain that they're going to pull the table. So, we have to see right now what happens and just continue to get the waiver in the meantime. Um hope that something does change, otherwise we'll be required to purchase these. And as Tony mentioned, there could be some penalties, such
034as not inspecting these buses and other such penalties for school districts that don't don't meet the mandate. It wouldn't be a problem if they could supply a bus that works. And that's the bottom line. You're in the model T stage of the electric bus. The technology is not developed. So, the safety's not there. The durability and endurance is not there to meet the functionality of our district. So, probably run around with electric buses. There's There's districts I know in the past that have started that do have some of these buses. They've gotten them through grants and what not. And I know some they shared um some of their experiences and there's There's one district not too far away that I had mentioned that they're still in delivery. It's been a number of years and they're
035still not arrived. That's That's an issue. Another district has a couple of them before they said and they're they're not running cuz they can't complete bus routes in terms of the battery life and there's also cost to charging them. Um so, they're they're not meeting the expectations that they had hoped for when they acquired the buses. So, in terms of you know, local districts here that do have them, it hasn't been too good, frankly. The They're not meeting the expectations so far. There's also the question of we're bussing kids an hour and 15 minutes away or there's a sports event. We might have to use that school's charging station to charge our bus so we can get our kids back. And vice versa. So, who's paying for that electric, you know, if we actually have
036to use another school's charging station down the road? And there's just so many questions that need to be answered that Maybe there are some districts that are testing the waters and have some experience with this so we can learn from it. But it just seems like there's we have such a long way to go before we force into this. And then they're also more than double the cost. And the safety of it, too. I mean, probably Vermont, I think they they they had one of their electric buses catch fire and it caught all the other buses on fire and they lost their whole fleet. It's just There's no doubt there's safety concern from from some from parents that can voice um Frank you mentioned on site. So, There's a notion requirement. You know, the disconnect,
037you can't reach it. The fire department is supposed to have these high voltage gloves inspected every 3 months like the power company. So that there is a safety issue if you come to a disabled bus, you just can't touch it. The case could be charged and that's the emotional training to stay away and you have to have somebody with special equipment and rural fire departments can't afford it. Yeah, you mentioned the cost of all this. This must be more expensive. Yeah, the total cost is half a million dollars. And you also need the infrastructure as well. Am I going to lead to anything? In terms of this you know, the charge your district infrastructure would be in place and you know, other spaces to be able to when they're you know, even on field trips
038or you know, if they're going to travel beyond the district as well and use buses and not to mention we have one of the more geographically challenging districts in terms of the roads our buses travel on and use more energy going down these roads traverses. It's not the city of Albany obviously in terms of what what buses would be facing. Okay, I can definitely see it being a benefit to urban schools or even suburban schools that aren't so spread out. Yeah, I mean a couple regional districts have some of the schools that have been there much more positive, you know, news from those districts but again the distance of traveling and geography is much different than in the more rural schools being in Rensselaer County. Yeah, you know, the last thing I want to bring
039up was I know there was a great turnout for these different town meetings we had and I feel like since we've lost our local paper, we just don't have a good way to communicate to a lot of community So they look at the department Facebook or you know, don't go to the school's website. I Is there a way that we can I mean, the budget's set, right? But is there a way that we can find money in that budget to start sending out more natural physical mailings to our communities so they actually get more, you know, information that's not all it's not all on radio or try to get it online but people aren't going online to get this information. Any budget you know, I said that we should have about a million dollars in
040flexibility. So, any budget should have some flexibility tools and things like that. I would also say that we need to be very selective in what you choose to do that because both mailings are uh thousands of dollars. On that note, I feel like to thank again the link great tool and go out but doing these town meetings, although there's a small turnout, I think the towns have conversations that the district may be able to communicate with the communities. Thank you, uh I just I would have to say that Berlin had the highest turnout actually here in in the auditorium again. Most people was a huge turnout. I was just surprised that most people came here. We did travel to to Grafton. You want to thank the community as well and the board and the board.
041Um the board took part in this. Um each presentation we had two or or three members that traveled with us. Uh Rachel and I traveled with you the last four weeks and you know, from Petersburg to Stephentown. Um you know, up to Grafton and um basically Berlin here, of course, as well. So, it was actually nice to get to see the towns a little bit more detailed than we were super candid. Visiting the um town halls and fire houses and VFWs and what not as well. Meeting some of the people. So, something that we'll we'll assess and continue to see, you know, what best way to reach our community from the from the potential looking at both mailing and maybe prioritizing what maybe we can send out. Also, how can we maybe just try to
042reach the community? Rachel did fine. Yeah, I I'd also like to thank the town um the towns have really been We created a new um listserv and I've emailed to the towns and all the librarians and the story hour people that have been running those and all the local fire departments and the fire chiefs. I have them on an email and they have been reposting things and it's been really actually quite successful um putting making spaces on their town pages for us because they're they're up against it as well without a newspaper. And so, we said, you know, please send us your stuff because we do have a community page as well. So, we're trying to network in that way as well. I I found a parent same with those other parents. I saw PS
043two weeks ago. She actually made a comment to me about town meetings something she I think it was a pre-kinder pre-K registration or something and which made a comment Rachel and I were chatting and Rachel reached out to the the towns and they all were very well tell us all and she that was the way. So, some people are on social media but still aren't seeing our page but they're seeing it other ways. So, we're just trying to listen to how people are access access accessing information from the town's pages and the way up. And the the budget binders are currently all in all of the libraries. So, you can really get a line by line uh Don put those together. Those are there and um the newsletters are being printed currently and they should
044be hitting the mailboxes next week. Yeah, thank you Rachel for for that and first of all collaborating on that as well. I also remind the community before we do get to close out the the budget vote is on May 19th at the ES some of the school it's starts at 12:00 and doors, you know, will will close at 9:00. So, 12:00 to 9:00 at the ES on Tuesday, May 19th. And then the board will be on 20th to adopt those results. So, we hope that voters will come out and state. Okay, now the uh executive session is for Uh legal matter. On your motion for an executive session for legal counsel. I'll move it. Second. Second. All right, take a short recess here. We can reconvene to catch up with ours and we do not
045anticipate coming back to doing additional public on business. Okay. Thank you.