001Yeah. So if you hit if you hit right Yeah. So like look here now. Turn yours on. >> Frank is on. >> Wait. I don't think so. Frank just turned. >> Oh yeah. You cut me off. >> Does it cut him off? >> No. >> Yeah. But then I cut back in. >> Do it now. >> Hello. A whole practice training. Yeah. Come on. >> Yeah. See, it cut me off. All right. Now we're Now we're going to cut. All right. Good evening everyone. I'm going to call this meeting to order at 603. Please stand for the pledge of allegiance. >> All right. Good evening once again and I'm going to turn the mic over to um Mrs. Diva. >> Good evening and welcome to the May 7th, 2026 budget hearing. In the unlikely event
002of an emergency, please proceed to the exits located at the front and rear of the auditorium. Please also note that smoking and the use of vape products are strictly prohibited on school grounds. Following the budget overview m presented by Mr. Maisy, members of the public will have an opportunity to offer comments or ask questions. Each speaker will be allotted three minutes and time may not be shared between individuals. The annual budget vote and board of education trustee election will take place on Tuesday, May 19th. Polls will be open from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. at five locations: Eagle Elementary School, Tmont Elementary School, Saxton Middle School, Medford Elementary School, and South Ocean Middle School. Your polling location depends on where you live. Residents south of Main Street will vote at South Ocean Middle School. Those
003living between Main Street and Sunrise Highway will vote at Medford Elementary. Residents between Sunrise Highway and Woodside Avenue will vote at Saxton Middle School. Anyone living between Woodside Avenue and the Medford Train tracks will vote at Tmont Elementary. And finally, residents north of Medford train tracks will cast their ballots at Eagle Elementary. This information can also be found on our website at pmschools.org under the board of education tab. To be eligible to vote, you must be at least 18 years of old. 18 years old, a US citizen, a resident of the district for at least 30 days prior to May 19th. You must also be registered with the school district board of registry or with the Suffach County Board of Elections. If you are registered with the Suffach County Board of Elections, you're automatically registered
004for this vote. The last day to register to vote is May 13th. You may register at district office between up until 4:30 p.m. that day. However, we do encourage residents to register with the Suffach County Board of Elections through vote.org so that you are registered for all elections, not just the school vote. Absency ballot and early mail ballot applications are available on our website pmschools.org under the board of education tab. The application must be submitted by May 13th to my office in the district office, 241 South Ocean Avenue in Patchro. We have four candidates running for three seats. There are two seats carrying a three-year term beginning July 1st, 2026 and ending June 30th, 2029. In addition, there is one seat with a shorter term that begins on May 19th, 2026 and concludes on June
00530th, 2027. Of the top three vote getters, the candidate receiving the fewest votes will fill the shorter one-year term. We are pleased to introduce the four candidates this evening, beginning with our current board of education president, Kellyanne Jennings. Also with us tonight, we have Miss Laura Bons. I don't know if we have Mr. Mark Gman. I don't think he's here. And Miss Michelle Martina. Thank you all for joining us and good luck on May 19th. Mr. Maisie. uh utilizing every bucket of money that we have available to us. It is absolutely critically important and paramount and you're going to hear me talk about that over the course of the next few slides. But uh I did want to include one of the pieces in there, that fourth icon. There is an increase in the state
006aid of 300 uh plus thousand that is for the universal prek funding. Now that is earned as you use it for on a per student basis. So it's not we wouldn't realize the whole amount unless we have it for all those students. However, what's more important perhaps is there's a proposal for this to become a mandate that we have to have a seat for every student in the year 2829. So, we need to keep our eyes on that because that's critically important because not only is finding space in our buildings certainly a challenge for us, but UPK requires that they have a bathroom in the classroom and we do not have that in all of our classrooms and making something like that happen is not something that's going to happen overnight. So, it's going to
007take a lot of planning. We need to keep a very diligent eye on this over the next few years. So, what does our proposed budget look like for 2627? It's just over $252 million. That represents a budget-to-budget appropriation increase of 2.83%. Now, as of the other day when I looked at the rankings for uh Suffach and Nassau, out of the 120 districts, that places us 64th on the list. So, just on the other side of half, but that's a good place for us to be. So, when you hear me talk about things like having a fiscally responsible budget, something that's reasonable for the community, that's one of the reasons I think that is that's true. We're right there in the middle of the pack. uh not overexerting, not under, making sure we have what we
008have uh have what we need for our students, but also being respectful of our community's support. Now, a very important caveat in our budget is the 2.5 inter uh 2.5 million interfund to transfer in interfund transfer to capital. Try that in English. Okay, I'm going to spend the next slide going through that in detail. But what's important about this budget is once again um we are proposing a budget to the community that does not pierce the tax cap which means that we are within the allowable levy limit prescribed by the state. I'll share more about that as well. We're not exceeding that. So we need a simple majority in order to pass this budget. Um when I do go through that when we talk about the levy that does differ from the tax rate. They're
009two totally different things. I'll spend a decent amount of time on the tax rate since that really has resonated with our community in the last few years that I've been doing this presentation and those rates and those levies are going to differ from one district to the next. So when you open Newsuesday and you scroll down and you look to see where is Pat Med, everyone's levies going to be different depending upon the exclusions in that formula. People have different tax rate uh tax growth rate percentages as well, but those things all contribute to every district getting a different number. That's why you don't see a standard number across the board. So the misconception is when you hear a 2% tax cap, it does not mean your budget is capped at 2%. Does not mean
010your levy is capped at 2%. What it means is, and I'll get to this on that slide, is it is your levy can grow by the lesser the lesser of 2% or CPI. Okay? So if CPI, which is inflation, is five, six% like it is now, our levy can only grow at 2%. If it's less than that, it's 1.7%. a levy can only grow by that amount. So they put that in that formula, but they kind of broadcast as a 2% tax cap and it is somewhat misleading to the community and that's what we've been really sharing with them over the past few years. So let's talk about those four words that I couldn't say before. The proposed inter fund transfer to capital. Why is this so important? You've heard me say this each and
011every year. This is a component of our budget which is specific specifically designed Wow, I'm having a tough time tonight. Must be the new mic. uh for capital projects. And this is a much smaller scale, right?$ 2.5 million in the grand scheme of things. We're not talking like an $80 million bond. We're talking about going out and doing projects without incurring new bonded debt for our community. So we look at the projects that we can do within the confines. So what I tell people is one of the big things that we utilize for our guideline for the interfont transfer is the building condition survey. We call it the BCS. And our architects perform this every five years. And they look at every single building, every single room, our grounds, and they go to top to
012bottom. And they assign a priority of one to five for each and every component. And then they assign an an estimate as to what it could cost to make a repair, to make a replacement, to make a necessary upgrade. We take a look at that and that's a good tool. It's a very good guiding document in general. However, when I first looked at the report, uh, and now the last one was in 2022, I looked at it and looked in to in its totality, and it's over 113 million worth of projects. And you don't have to be a math wiz and realize at 2.5 million a year, we're not getting there. We're not getting there. This is a small component, but it's it's very evident when I share this with people because it's very evident
013of what our needs are as a district and why we need to be extremely diligent in how we utilize our operating budget, our inner fund transfer, our bond monies, and our capital reserve. So, you're going to hear me talk about inner fund now and then capital reserve next. So, as we go through this this BCS, we also um the committee that I chair, the buildings and operations committee, we are vetting this out throughout the year. So, we're looking at this report as to what's really critically important to the district. We're listening to what's taking place in our buildings, things that we're witnessing, things that we're hearing, and we're also taking into account community voice, student voice, parent voice as to what we think we need to do. It's not a lot of money, but we
014need to spend this money the best way possible in the interest of as many people as possible. That's the challenge here. And so, what we've tried to do is look at this. And last year when I stood in front of you, I told you I had this great plan and I still maintain it's a really good plan. We want to do uh the floor tile abatements instead of doing them on a oneoff basis the way we've been doing them. I said if we do two rooms at a time or four or a wing at a time or a building at a time, we're going to benefit by the economies of scale and thereby save money on our bidding too. Right? It's a smart way to go about it, especially if we do the floor tile
015removal ahead of the univvents that are coming in and that's a really smart way to think about it. And we were headong into last year we did 1.2 million of this money toward the floor tile abatements. The plan was to do it again this year, but this year we've encountered uh a significant number of bathroom repairs this year. When I say significant, well beyond what was budgeted for in our operating budget. When I tell you to the tune of in excess of six figures for repairs, unforeseen repairs, some could be some could be uh indicative of the old age of our bathrooms and the plumbing, but some are done by staff or students. We had issues with flushing wipes down the down the the drains, vapes, paper towels. And this is not just an us
016thing. I've been I've been showing Lori text everywhere I go in public establishments where I see them doing it. my own physical rehab place where only adults are there and they say please don't flush the hand towels down the toilets and that's troubling that adults would actually think to flush a hand towel a physical towel linen towel down the toilet. It's not just us but guess what we've got to address it here and we've got to figure this out. So the bathroom monies that you see up there the 1.5 million is critically needed. It's going to be cosmetic in nature of course, but also we're going to try to address this to try and see what we can to do what we can do to minimize this problem for next year. >> So that's why
017we have uh the 1.5 million. Now the second item that you see on there is the outdoor abatement. This is the soil remediation for bay. As we went through the whole process for looking at what took place at Bay with that un um known discovery of the asbestous materials and we saw the significance of the cost to remove the soil off our premises and cart them to Ohio which is a certified facility and we realized that two stock piles that were there already cost us almost $600,000. We knew that the monies that we had saved on our capital reserve were in jeopardy of completing that project. And the board is fully aware of this. And this is really for the community's benefit. This board spent an inordinate amount of time with myself, with the superintendent,
018with the whole team that was involved, my team internally in the district, the construction manager, the architects to figure out how are we going to salvage and save that bay project and get this done within the capital monies that we had already saved up in reserve, which was 13.9 million. When we look at this and we have the now added cost of the soil remediation, a lot of concerns came about. This is a solution that if we realize that we need extra monies, we thought it was prevalent to take monies that can be designated just for that purpose and put them towards that. That's why you see a million dollars there. But now these are numbers, like I said, that we're estimating. These are the schools that we're estimating. But if these numbers come in
019better when we go out to bid or if our bid on the outdoor baitment comes in less than what we anticipate, we've got a notation on there that we can then go attack other projects and other buildings. The most important thing here is that the community is voting on this in totality that these funds can be spent simply for capital upgrades. And what we don't want to do is leave money on the table because we didn't share the information with them. So if we do come in less, we can attack other schools like South Ocean or Eagle for their bathrooms. We can do projects within the BCS project uh BCSS report like I told you or we can go back and do that floor tile abatement. All these are certified or eligible sources, but it's
020smart for us to be able to go out and do that especially if we're the benefactor of good bidding. So you see High School, Medford, and Barton listed there for our bathroom upgrades. We like to try to touch every building when we talk about interfront transfer in terms of equity. not always possible, but we're looking to do another five buildings now with our capital reserve. So, our capital reserve is a different funding source. It's separate and apart from the budget, but critically important. So, the capital reserve is based on monies that we've underexpended in previous years, that we put in our savings bank, our piggy bank, if you will, for future use. You have to ask the community to establish a capital reserve. That's that's vote number one. And vote number two, which will be
021this year, proposition number two, is to ask the community if they're okay with how we plan to spend those monies. So, we tell the community, we'd like to spend $5 million of the money that we've saved. And this is our purpose. And that's why you see that separate proposition. Once again, separate and apart from the budget, but critically important. One outcome of one vote does not affect the other. And the use of our capital reserve does not impact taxpayer dollars, meaning the tax rate will not be impacted. These monies are already ours. They've already been previously approved on future on previous budgets. They're now in our in our savings, our piggy bank, if you will. We just want to have their uh authority to now uh expend them. But what we're looking to do is
022not just these five buildings to try and get as many buildings as possible. We realize that our parking lots are in are in disrepair as well. But I can't do parking lot projects and get building aid on them because they're an outside project. But if I tab them to an inside project such as a bathroom, then we get aided on everything in its entirety. And so that's the logic is go out there to $5 million worth of projects and get aided on the whole thing. And just as a as a recap, we get about 73% roughly in aid. So that's really wonderful way to to spend these monies. But once again, you'll see the notation on the bottom that if the bidding comes back less than expected on any or all these buildings, we go
023out to attack as many other buildings as we can. >> Can I ask a question now or do you want me to wait until later? >> You can certainly ask. >> Okay. So, my question is I kind of did like a quick uh scan of schools and uh you don't have Bay in there with the BCS survey. Um, how are what is the state of BA's bathrooms and why did we leave that off? >> So, it's not the the state of BA's bathrooms as much. When we look to do this, um, like I said, this is not an exact science. What we're trying to do is take monies that the entire community is voting on, and spread them out. We know Bay >> is getting their upgrades, >> the building addition with the 13.9 million,
024which was which was noble of this community when you think about it, right? When we voted on that, the entire community said, "We're going to allocate $14 million of of our monies toward one building." Wonderful. That's that's tremendous community support in my in my opinion. We know that that work's taking place. But if you go back to that last slide, we do have a million technically allocated to our bay because we might need it for the abatement, which is to support um the addition so that it doesn't fall by the wayside. So, if we have extra money from the Bay addition, would we do BA's bathrooms then and then all the bathrooms are done? >> Well, I will tell you this. We did the Bay the nurse's bathroom when we did the capital project in
0252018. They're getting one, two, three, I think it's three new bathrooms as part of the addition as well. >> Thank you. And the classrooms had the ADA bathrooms and some of the classrooms in the new plan are going to have it. So, there are a few there. Will there be some? Yes. Um, if we came in less, if your question is if we come in less on our capital project bidding, could we do that? I'd have to take a look at the specs to say. >> Okay. Thank you. >> But it's a great question because we're trying to touch as many buildings as we possibly can. And like I said, I've been telling people, knock on wood, like we've been fortunate, we've been getting good bidding in this district for years, and that's a wonderful
026thing. When we went out to bid on the roofs, I was not here for that. I think the plan was to get three or four roofs done for the money. when the bids came back, we get to do all 11. That's a that's a great thing. But contractors also want to be here. We are a good payer and we're utilizing that to our advantage. Um the fact that they want to be here and we want them here, we work with them. Um that's a winning that's a winning formula, I think. You're welcome. Anyone else before I move on? Okay. So, some notable staffing changes. So, over the past few years, this has been a slide that has been full with changes. As you as you recall, we had that three-year plan where we were taking
027all those ARPs, the ARP money, the federal funding that we got for all those supports um academically related primarily, and we looked, we knew that we needed to maintain those for our staff, for our students more importantly, right? And we said we need a plan to fold that into this budget. And that's why there were so many uh increases over the last three to four years. If you look in the news day once again, you're going to see districts that did not plan for that. They weren't prudent planning. So where I used to work in Greenport, they have roughly 70 some odd staff members. They're letting go 20. If you're doing the math at home, that's an alarming number. Alarming number that people are going to be out of work. South Country who's been in
028the news every other day, they're letting go 70 staff members. So, it's funny like when you do the right things, you don't you don't make the news. We've been doing the right things for a long time now. And it may not be that attractive to them in News Day, but this is what we owe to this community. And this is why we should be very proud of what we're putting forth, but we do have some notable staffing changes. Um, and they're very near and dear to me because I've been watching the numbers grow. And most of those supports that we've been putting in place have been on the instructional side and rightly so as I mentioned. But as we've grown our staff, what we haven't grown is some of our supports, our operational supports in
029the same way. So for instance, our payroll department has been the same since I got here as an intern. We've had three people maintaining the the payroll every two weeks for the for an increasing number of staff members with thousands and thousands and thousands of claim forms coming in. I think it's high time we upgrade the business office by one FTE. That's one full-time equivalent to support not just payroll but also the accounting side which has grown as well corresponds to the number of expenditures that have grown through the more services that we're requiring the more uh goods that we're buying to increase staff. So I want to bring in somebody and we'll do like a 6040 split or 7030 split but someone to support those needs. The second piece is to add a maintenance
030mechanic three. And primarily what I'm thinking here is the way I was thinking with that asbestous floor tile. Let's get ahead of this. We have new unit ventilators coming into our district. Wouldn't it be smart to bring in somebody on the ground floor that who familiarizes themselves with this brand new equipment who knows everything about them so that we can troubleshoot them right out of the gate? And people said, "Well, you know, they're brand new. Okay, they're they're going to be warrantied. They're going to last." But I want them to know how this works. Here's the other thinking. We still have eight other buildings that are not getting done this summer. Eight buildings with failing systems that require more and more repairs each and every year. Wouldn't it be smart to bring in somebody who
031works for us? Because we have some very talented people in our maintenance department and utilize their skills the same way when we bring back a student from Boseies and we save money here. the more I can do inhouse with our staff and less I have to contract with outside services the more money we're going to save and once again that's how I try to stretch our dollar further so that's that's the rationale for the maintenance mechanic ad and then the reduction of the half of an FTE um we had a sub caller uh who's since retired and thanks to Dr. Cohen, her responsibilities have been absorbed by his office. So, there's no need for even replacing. So, we're actually going to save and have FTE on that on that um on that line. Yes. >>
032Frank, can you give me a a ballpark on what the cost estimate a cost savings is on doing I mean, I know it's we've been doing a lot of work inhouse with our guys in house and they do great work. Uh and I know that there is a cost savings. Can you do has you have has you guys worked out a a cost estimate as to how much we're saving by hiring a new person versus outsourcing the work. >> So the simple answer to that is no. Um on a on an on on that to answer it like very honestly. Can I do that? Probably. It would really depend like a lot of times what we're doing is um a lot of our calls are emergency calls. Um so that we pay a premium for
033those as well. Um, but there are times there are sometimes where our say if it's a if it's an HVAC thing and I only have two people right now that they can't run around and do everything. So, we need to bring in an outside company. Um, we know the numbers of are exorbitant. I've told you that on the the plumbing repair alone. Um, I can get so I can put together something roughly for you. Um, yeah. Is your request Thank you. I know that uh our our our maintenance and our facilities guys have done great jobs building out the new classrooms and the new and the new kitchens and the new stone rather than they did the work rather than subbing it out to corporations and I'm so grateful to their work. Um it would
034be just interesting to see without putting too much extra work on the business office what that number is. >> No, it is a great question and we should see those like these are right these early returns. This is wonderful because this is existing POS as Nicole mentioned we can already see now as we close them out but next year we should be able to stand here and say here's some tangible evidence of of what we've done to an extent. Right. Okay. So this is a a summary of our revenue. So when we talked early about why that state aid was so important, you know, we don't have the final numbers from the state, you take a quick look at the pie chart and say, "Wow, state aid is 40% of our revenues, right? Our reliance
035on our on our community is is uh like like most districts is paramount source of the district, but 40% of state aid. why we have to why those those nickels are so very very important for us to get. Um but that's a part chart that kind of breaks the revenues down the expenditures same thing that although the difference here on the expenditure size we're required uh by law to report our breakdown excuse me our breakdown of our uh budget in terms of three components they call the tri component budget. You have to break out your program piece which is instructional, your capital piece which is your facilities and things that we're talking about those capital improvements and then the last piece is your ad administration and they like to see that and they also look
036at those ratios for these numbers too. So this is a breakdown to show um our instructional program is 74% of the budget in terms of our expenses. Our capital is about 15% and our administrative piece is 10%. because once again, it's a nice snapshot for someone who can take a look at this, say, how is it that we're spending our monies in this district. And that's how we break out the information in our budget brochure in accordance with that same law. So, here's that property tax cap formula um that I mentioned earlier. I'm not going to go through the whole thing, but when you see all the factors that go into deriving your tax levy limit, okay, when you take a look at the one, what was it? Fourth from the bottom, the allowable levy
037growth factor. That's the one that I mentioned earlier where I say that's the lesser of 2% or CPI. Uh that's where that 2% comes in. Like I said, it gets seen get seems to get stabbed to the whole tax cap. Uh that's how people refer to it. However, that's where it is. Um but like I said, you see all the different exclusions that can be in there. Our tax base growth factor, the piece, the third from the top, it was 1.0021. 0021 this year. It's negligible. Means basically doesn't even grow by that much. But that's the reality of what we're dealing with. Those are the when we talk about the challenges to de developing a budget. That's some of them. But once again, um uh and this this presentation will be on the website tomorrow
038for you to peruse certainly and see this because this is a very important piece. Um as is the property tax rate which I'm going into next. Um, but this levy that we proposed uh is within the permissible limit. Uh, I'm going to talk about that and we only need a simple majority to pass. So, here it is. The levy to levy increase is just over 4 million. It is a 3.15% increase. What does that mean in terms of tax rate? That's what people want to know. So, the levy is one of two items that help derive tax rate. You take the tax levy and you divide it by the assessed valuation that is provided by the town of Brook Haven. Here's the caveat. We don't get that assessed valuation from the town of Brook Haven
039until like August or September. But we're asking the community to vote upon this in May. It's a big challenge because how do you tell them how the budget can affect their wallet without having that data? So, what we're forced to do is provide an estimate. And what the business office has done for years prior to me and and since me we've been doing this we provide a range because if the assessed valuation goes down, okay, the property tax rate is going to go up. So what we do is we assume a worst case scenario that assessed valuation is going to go down and we start at zero with no declination and we go upwards of 1%. And the reason I use a range of zero to one is because in the last 13 years and
040I look at the data, okay, only four times has it ever exceeded a 1% declination. But if you flip that script, say that means nine years out of 13 it's been positive. And if it's positive, even by the smallest of numbers, that means we're going to come in below that lowest number that you see. So that lowest number is 3.29. That assumes a zero declination in your assessed valuation. So if it stays flat, okay, this budget would mean an increase for the average home in Patrick and Medford communities of 3.29%. 3.29. If assessed valuation goes down by upwards of 1%, it could be 4.34. Now, what does that mean in terms of dollars? For the average home in our communities, which the town tells us is uh valued at $2,800. A zero declination, which is
041that 3.29% number I just mentioned, would mean to support this budget, the annual increase is $28,512. That's for the year. That's less than a dollar a day, basically if you feel in favor of supporting this budget. But should you want more information down at the bottom that's a hyperlink to the property tax tutorial that we prepared and that number that presentation rather runs you through all the terminology where to find assess valuation all this information that the town provides and we ran the numbers from assess valuation from 1500 all the way through 11,000. So you can go down and go across and see exactly what the impact would be for your home your property to support this budget. We just can't put them on the slide because they'd be really, really, really small numbers. So,
042here's the property tax rate. There's a lot of data here, but there's that formula I mentioned at the top for your convenience. But if you look to the far right, there's the change in the assessed value. And what I want you to see there is this is not all 13 years, but if you look back 1718, there's that one year I told you about. There's the one time it went past 1%. You see a couple of other negatives, but look at all the positive numbers. Look at in 23 20 22 23 and 23 24 when it went up 06 and 07 it went up such a negligible amount but even in those years what that means is the numbers we gave to the community were very real what they voted on was very accurate means
043we came in under that lowest number that we presented so in this case that 3.29 you could come under 3.27 3.28 28. That's the reality of it and we've been very fortunate. But look at those numbers. They tell a story and that's why I think we we send people to the polls armed with really important information that they can vote with confidence. But should a budget not fail, the board has a decision to make. The board can move to what's called a contingent budget, and I'll explain that in a second. Or they can take the the budget and put the same budget up for a revote. They can make a motion to change the budget. It can change it up or down. And yes, I did say it can go up. Even on a failed
044budget, you can increase it. Uh that has happened. That happened in Garden City about 15 years ago. They voted their budget down because they wanted more spending for their children. That's them. That's not us. We have to be reflective of what our community wants and what our community can support. Now, if we decide to move to a contingent budget, and the board does have that decision, you automatically have to go to that if you go to a revote and it fails twice. But if the board should decide to go to what does a contingent budget mean? Well, what it means is it's a zero levy increase. It means the same levy that we're working with this year is what you levy the following year. But it also means that there's certain things that we have
045to do. The first is it eliminates all equipment purchases for the budget. So, it's any items that cost over $1,500 or more, those are automatically out of the budget. The next thing it does is it removes that interfund transfer to capital that 2.5 million. That's the next thing that comes out. It also eliminates the new positions that we talked about, the new account clerk and the new maintenance mechanic. And it would also require us to reduce um five existing administrators and four clerical staff, two full-time and two part-time. Uh and of course their benefits. And then last, it would require us to reduce certain supplies, uh, travel expenses, conference expenses, things like that, because we need to now subscribe to that. We need the budget to be reduced by $4.2 million. That's just the the
046the effect of what a contingent budget could be. Now, financial plan projections. What we do when we talk about the budget development process, and you've heard me say this throughout the whole course of of our of our meetings and workshops that we have, there's a lot of behind the-scenes work. This is not done in a silo. Uh certainly not by myself, certainly not just by my team, but this is a toptobottom effort in this district. And I say it every year because I've never seen really a district so collaborative in nature. when the board's involved in the decision-making process, when the superintendent is involved, when the cabinet is having weekly discussions about it, when our administrative council is having monthly meetings to discuss this, when we're getting input not only from inside people, but from
047outside people and have them reflected in this budget. That's what's really important. But one of the reports that we do, and it probably doesn't get enough attention, is the five-year financial plan. This is a forecasting tool, and I'm going to show it to you in the next slide. And it's not the numbers on the slide that matter. It's how we utilize this on top of everything else we're doing. We're looking for trends. We're looking at data. We're looking at history to tell us a story to say, are we seeing increases in a certain area that we need to be mindful of in future years. So, the same way I talked about that un that mandate for the UPK and that's now on our radar, we're looking for other things, right? So, now plumbing, I told
048you, is a big thing. You don't think I'm going to be watching that now the next few years? Absolutely. We're watching that. to Trusty Smith's point, is the new maintenance mechanic, are they having an impact or not? These are the kinds of things. So, it helps us to prepare future budgets. It helps us to be able to talk to you about what we think the um challenges are for a given year when we have at the onset of our meetings. It talks about potential impacts. Um because budgeting is a lot of it is forecasting and you need to make educated um guesses. I don't say guesses, assumptions and certain things, but look at the data. There's just a lot of data. We're looking at previous years to try to forecast out for future years and
049the numbers will kind of point us in the direction of that. Now, I apologize. I know it's small for everyone. This is on the website separately so you can enlarge it and and and kind of dive into the numbers if if you so see. But like I said, a lot of thought goes into the decisions that we're making before we bring them forth to the community for consideration. Which leads us to our fund balance projections. Every year, like I said, this district has been uh really mindful of what is most important and that is being efficient with how we utilize our monies and being diligent with spending because when we can underspend our budget, we can save money. And when we save it, we know we pour it right back into the community. Like I
050said, then when you do it, when you pour it back into the community in the form of a capital reserve and you get funded money, money funded back from the state on that, that is a winwinwin. And that's what we're looking to do. Again, our projected unreserved fund balance is 3.94%. As a reminder, it can be a maximum of 4% from the state of what the uh next year's budget is. So, we're just under that threshold. That's a good place to be. We are proposing with this budget or what our outlook is is to fund uh with monies from this year uh $750,000 into our ERS that is our employee retirement uh reserve contribution fund into our TRS which is the teacher related they call it a sub fund but it's a teacher related one
051uh $250,000 and then another $750,000 into that capital reserve that we talked about earlier. So already we're talking about expending money from it and already putting looking money to put money right back into it. That's a really good situation to be in to be having this conversation every few years with we've saved up enough money and we're putting it back into the district. Every time we can utilize our reserves, we avoid new bonded debt and paying interest. And that's a wonderful situation anytime you can do that. So quickly about the district vote, this community has been very supportive. If you look at the last column of our passing rate percentage, that's the community voice in action. Look at those numbers. 58.3 is the lowest number for the last almost decade. That shows you that the
052community is really fully support. But look at some of those numbers in the 60s. Really telling that they firmly believe in the things that we are doing that the budgets that we are putting forth. Uh the voter turnout, you know, we started trending up. started going out and doing these community uh meetings and the road show as we we call it internally getting out to people and talking to them about it is bringing the presentation to them. It's really it was really helping. I think last year's dip um I don't know why we had a dip last year, but I do think that um not having a contested board of election uh seats, we had two seats, we had two people. I think that was that may be one of the reasons uh that's been
053shared with me and this year will be indicative of that because you heard Mr. Leva talk about it before we have four candidates for three seats and things like that typically give the public even more reason to come out and vote not just for the budget not just for a very important capital reserve vote but now also for our board of election for three seats out of seven. So that's that's really important. So this ballot this year is chock full of of very important things but but is good. But I do share with us just you know for what it's worth. I'm going to talk about voter apathy very quickly. We have 20,000 registered 20,000 plus registered voters. I think it's 23,000. Look at 2020. We had 6,000 voters. That was the year of COVID.
054That was the year that we didn't open the polls. That was the year that we put a self-addressed stamped envelope and mailed it to everyone's house. and all they had to do is check a box, lick the back of the envelope, and walk out to the mailbox. A third of the people in our communities to do that. And voter apathy is not exclusive to Patrick Medford. This is a this is an islandwide thing. This is statewide. This could even be countrywide, but it is the reality because voter apathy could threaten a very good and responsible budget. And that's the fear and that's the thing that's important about sharing with the community. uh what could be the potential of a contingent budget, what could happen in those not a threat, just sharing them what is the
055reality of this, why it is important to voice your opinion. Vote yes, vote no. Be informed about why you're voting, though. That's all I ask people. Be informed at what you're voting so you know why you're voting that way. So, here's the voter information. You heard Mr. Lever say it earlier. May 19th is the big day uh for the vote. Uh if we do need a revote, it is on June 16th and that's another hyperlink that is to the budget brochure um that was mailed out to all the houses, but you can click on it there. It's on our website. Uh you can also pick it up at our school buildings or my office at any point in time. And with that, I will be happy to entertain any questions. That cover everything. >> I
056think we asked all our questions when you went over the last couple meetings. >> That's fine. >> Line by line. >> Very good. Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate everyone's time, attendance. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being involved. Really, it's very important. Again, I just want to um really congratulate Mr. Maisy on once again putting together a very thoughtful budget. Thank you to the entire cabinet, all of our administration and our units out there for really helping to support the budget. It is truly a team effort. As Mr. Maisie said, and I'm really proud of the work we did this year to really put forward a budget that is um a solid and always thinking about the financial impacts to our community. I think we got everything in there, Mr.
057Massie, and thank you for your ongoing commitment to the community. Thank you. And Dorene and Nicole, he couldn't do it without you ladies. So, thank you. All right. So, can I have a motion to adjourn the meeting? >> Motion. >> I'll second. >> All in favor? >> I can't. >> Uh meeting at 6:45. >> But how how can we do in favor?