001Please join me in the pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. >> Thank you. >> All right. What's first on the agenda? Budget hearing from Caleb Russell. >> And I have to read this correctly. >> Okay. Notice is here. >> Yep. Sometimes you have to read. >> Okay. Notice is hereby given that the board of education of the Eldridge Central School District will hold a public budget hearing at the Junior Senior High School Gymnasium 600 Route 4055 Eldridge, New York on Thursday, May 7th, 2026 at 6 p.m. prevailing time for the purpose of discussing the proposed budget and expenditures
002of funds for the 2026 2027 school year July 1st 2026 through June 30th 2027. Notice is further given pursuant to section 1716 of the education law that a copy of the statement of the amount of money that may be required for the ensuing year for school purposes exclusive of public money together with the real property tax exemption report will be annexed to the budget of which it forms a part. Copies may be obtained by any resident of the district at the district office 600 Route 55 Eldra New York and at the following school buildings George Ross McKenzie Elementary School and Eldred Junior Senior High School. during the 14 days immediately preceding the annual budget vote and election between the hours of 8 am and 2 pm prevailing time excluding Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays. Such materials
003together with a text of any resolution to be presented to the voters will also be available on the district website. A copy of the detailed statement of estimated expenditures will also be available at the public budget hearing on May 7th, 2026. Am I reading the next one? >> Nope, I'm doing the Okay. All right. So, next year's proposed budget is this is actually to you guys. They've already been presented this and adopted it at the last board meeting. Uh, next year we are proposing a 2.38% increase to the taxes. That is at the tax cap but not above. Um, the entire increase to the budget is 2.45%. We're expecting uh an increase in state aid next year for the first time in quite a while. uh we are expecting about flat and the other other
004is interest rates have been holding steady uh the Fed has been reticent to decrease or increase interest rates at the moment. Uh the other portion to that is the Boseies refund. I tend to be conservative in that refund estimate. I estimate 365,000 every year because that's the lowest amount we've received in the last five years. That's typically what I use. The lowest amount I've gotten in the last five years. It has been as high as last year was $725,000. Um it varies from year to year depending on uh how students how many students go into CT and special ed is the biggest factor. So if uh on our final service requests uh an amount comes in and significantly more students go in the cost per student comes down and they refund that money to you
005the next year. Uh and our reserve use is actually to pay ourselves back. there uh is a $300,000 basically loan to ourselves from the cafeteria fund. We now transfer $230,000 over to our cafeteria fund which makes it uh not just break even, it makes it profitable to pay ourselves back that loan. Uh you're not supposed to carry those loans for uh an indefinite period of time. So uh that's that amount is basically going to be transferred from one fund to another. the school tax rates, the effect it's going to have. Uh this is based on last year's numbers. We don't have the current year's assessment data. The expectation is of course that there'll be some new properties that uh come on board. Um we also don't have the current year equalization rates. So I have
006no idea what is going to actually happen to each individual town. This assumes that the equalization rates stay the same and that uh no new properties go on. Now, some new properties will likely have been added to the tax rules this year, and equalization rates have been going down uh in the recent years. Uh they I know Highland and Lumberland just 5 years ago were at 100%. They're down to 55% right now. Uh however, they haven't published the new data yet. Um this is about on a $200,000 home assessment what taxes will go up per year. In Highland and Lumberland it's 7922 and 88118. In Tustin and Deer Park it's 12520 and 16650. Uh what happens in Tustin? So Tustin right now is at a 28% equalization rate. So what the state is saying is
007if your house is assessed at $200,000 it's worth closer to um I'm sorry closer to $800,000. Right? And so that's what they mean by an equalization rate because in Lumberland with a 55% equalization rate, a $200,000 house is just shy of 400,000. And so if both of those taxes in theory were to pay that rate, the same market value house should pay this about the same amount in real estate taxes regardless of which district you're in. Market value, not assessed value. Um, now what happens individually is that's not always the case. And um there's a lot of factors that can affect that. Uh our breakdown of our revenue, we're down to about 28% of our revenue is state aid. Our state aid is uh low. It's the lowest that it can get for Boseies. It
008is 26% for transportation aid. That's not the lowest it can get, but it's getting down there. Um that's based on our real property wealth. And uh also they take the income tax of every resident, divide it by the number of students, which I think is is not an accurate way to determine what people can afford, but that's how they do it right now. Um and so this district is on the lower end of aid because of that. Um so property taxes make up the bulk of our revenue. Uh and then the others are are smaller amounts. We used a little bit more in reserves this year to pay down the the cafeteria amount. That's not going to have an actual effect on the fund balance. It's just going to switch it from one fund to
009the other, but um that kind of skews those numbers. That'll stop after a couple years. Um the property tax cap this year, that's how it's calculated. Um the growth factor, that 1.0124, 1.24% 24% is the difference between um not last year's but the year before's tax roles and last year's tax roles. Meaning the value the new property that was built and assessed and added to the tax roles was about a 1.24% increase. Meaning this shouldn't really affect your tax rate much. New new properties should absorb that for the most part. Um the rest of it is the difference between pilots year-to-year. And then the exemptions are capital projects and transportation um capital. So buses, the bus lease. So if the if state aid goes down, the tax cap goes up to absorb that. Um that
010only happens with capital expenditures. That does not happen with um fuel and those are increased costs that we're seeing next year. In the expenditure budget, uh the general support is only going up 1.67%. Instruction's only going up 1.08%. Transportation also 1.93%. Employee benefits are the biggest driving factor for our increase in budget this year, 5.45%. That is being driven heavily by a 7% increase in health insurance cost, which is the bulk of our um employee benefits, somewhere in the $3 million range. Um, debt is staying steady, transfers are staying steady, that includes that cafeteria transfer. Uh, so instruction is 48.41% of our expenditures. Uh, when you include employee benefits, it's probably a lot more than that. they have us break that out. But um if you were to aortion it to each of these uh
011sections, employee bene we're an educational institution. So people is the major expenditure. Um notable changes to the for the most part we are just holding our program steady this year. There aren't uh we aren't expecting any increases in employment or major decreases in employment. Employment benefits are going up. Um the governor and the house have still not agreed on a budget. Uh and it is as of this evening they're both uh at odds about whether they're in agreement. So the governor said that they were in agreement on a budget and then the leader of the house came out today and said that that is not true. We are not in agreement on a budget. Uh so we don't actually know. We're using the estimates that we were given by the governor and I'm making some
012key assumptions because there doesn't seem to be any argument about the UPK. So, in this budget, I am assuming we are going to get the UPK increase. If that doesn't happen, then we are going to have to make some adjustments. I'm not assuming that we're going to get the 2% increase in um foundation aid. So, I'm using the governor's foundation aid, but I'm using that UPK funding uh number to determine these numbers. Um I'm also assuming no major cuts or changes to foundation aid which there hasn't been any talk about that. Uh there doesn't that doesn't seem to be the sticking point either. So um just to note if there are some significant changes we would have to go back into the you know have some discussion about what needs to be done to move
013expenditures around. So the there's a $100,000 project. We included that again. Um the state allows you to do one $100,000 project without going out for separate um public approval every year. Uh this year there's a fiber upgrade that we're doing here. They uh as part of the capital project when you do a when you send it to the office of facilities, they require that you basically pick a building. You get a project number and that project number is the only one that qualifies for that. So this year we're doing doors here and um fiber upgrade. That doesn't mean that that's the only work that we can do. We have equipment budget as well and um we have other repairs and mainten repairs and maintenance budgets. Um but this is the only one that will count
014towards the building aid and that can get the expedited um nice approvals that we would want. Um this amount is included in the tax cap. part of the tax cap is the difference between capital expenditures last year and the capital expenditures this year. Um it's not increasing the tax cap because last year we did a $100,000 project as well. So 100 minus 100 is zero and so this hasn't affected it. However, if one year we don't do a $100,000 project, it would decrease the tax cap. Um there's a transportation proposition three on the um on the ballot. It requests voter approval of a bus purchase not to exceed $2.5 million. This is being done two years in advance because we uh needed to put a letter of intent in with them to get the buses
015on time. This will be a purchase of 1166 passenger vehicles, 148 passenger and 130 passenger to replace our current fleet of 1266 passenger and 320 passenger buses. What we found with the 20 passenger buses was they are generally not being used. In fact, two of them ended up being sent back on this current, uh, lease, which and didn't have to make the payments on them. But, um, they're you can only fit 9 to 12 depending high schoolers on them. So, what ends up happening is you either take two vans or you take the larger bus if you want to take more people on it. Uh, so we ordered some larger buses, but we ordered one less bus overall. Unfortunately, the cost of buses has gone up 41.65%. 65%. So the current fleet of buses is
016around just shy of 2.5 million which is why the request and last set of buses was 1.75 million. Uh that's the cost of the buses outright. So they have gone up 41.65% and that's diesel buses. The electric buses are are wildly expensive. The total cost of purchasing compared to leasing over an 8-year period is about $126,68 uh less. I don't know why I use cheaper not factoring in the cost of an electric conversion um should we be forced to do one. So that is using a worst case scenario. It's likely going to be significantly cheaper. That is if we pay So using these using these figures a lease would be about $414,083 a year. Uh if I broke the purchase out over eight years it would be 372457. uh which it would probably be the
017best way to do it in terms of um flattening out any any tax impact. Um because if we did it over five years, what would happen is you'd have a big jolt up and then on your last payment when the aid kicked off, you'd have a big jolt down. And so we're trying to kind of smooth that out and keep it um even. Uh I am assuming that at the end of five years, you get the same warranty, by the way, on a new bus purchase as you do on the lease. So for the first 5 years we would have an extended body chassis and um mechanical warranty. So everything would continue to operate as is for 5 years. At the end of the 5 years we now own the buses rather than giving them
018back. However, we wouldn't have to start a new lease. Um then we'd be responsible for our own repairs. I was extraordinarily conservative in the repair number. I took the highest repairs we had on the 12-year-old buses from 2017, which was $83,000, and then I increased it by almost 40%, which was what the buses have gone up over that time. That's very unlikely to happen. Uh so likely our repair costs are going to be considerably lower. Uh we also don't have to give back the aid. So you'll see in 2033 and 2034 a negative aid number. When you return the buses, how the lease works is a lease buyback. So they we make five payments and then they make a balloon payment. The last one was 511,000. Since we aren't doing a lease this time, I
019assumed that if we did do a lease, I'd be able to negotiate a price that was 41.65% higher, uh, which would be 724. So I put this into a loan calculator, in which case we would be doing 3.6% interest, which is what we got on our current loan. That's what we got on our bond as well. um at the end when they make that balloon payment and take ownership of the buses, we have to treat that as a sale of the buses for the amount of the balloon payment and that becomes a negative number on our transportation aid report. So you'll report 1.4 million in aidable transportation aid costs and then negative 742 for a sale of the buses. However, you'll have a new lease that's giving you um aid on that and so they'll
020somewhat offset each other, but you'll get a net negative $15,000 in that transition year when you have a lease. Uh that is was uh that hit us on our last one uh about a year ago. And so over the period of time, it's about $120,000 different $128,000 difference. That's assuming the extraordinarily high repairs. That's assuming that the bond we get is 4% rather than 3.6%. You do tend to get higher interest rates the longer you go out. Um, so I'm assuming I'm not going to get a lower interest rate than I got on my last loan, but I might. We might. Um, and that assumes that we're going to continue having 26% transportation aid. Um, if any of those numbers change, this changes. It also assumes now in the last 3 years of the lease,
021you'll see it's only 496. So, what I made an assumption was between the last lease and this lease, diesel buses went up 41%. So, I am assuming that they're going to go up 41% again 5 years from now. That's the 496. But I'm also assuming that we aren't forced that they're going to change their mind on electrification. And see, so I'm being very conservative on the bus purchases because likely in 2032 333, we're going to be required to go electric, which is the other reason that we want to go on the purchasing route is this gives us all the way until 3435. So it gives us until the very last year to transition to electric should we choose to. Uh, and the electric buses are significantly more expensive, almost twice even after the even after
022the New York vouchers. The New York will give $135,000 voucher. The bus is still $300,000 after that. Um, and if the public has any questions, I'm happy to answer them. >> Where has the district studying the possibility of um uh shifting start and end times minimally at each building to just do one bus run district wide? So we did do uh a study on that. It would require a fair amount of work. So we do have we have the data on how we would go about doing it. That's how far we've gotten is we got that as part of our um transportation study where they told us this is about how many buses you would need and when you would need to change start times and stop times at each school in order to accommodate
023that. Um, and then we have not gone any further than just discussing the logistics of that cuz we'd have to do some hiring and potentially >> to help Caleb with that in that transportation study. Um, it was not a savings if we went to a one tier what they would consider just a one tier bus. um because of the we would have to if we to include all the kids in all the runs it came down to it by the way having two staggered times was actually cheaper than having one bus run for the entire district and >> ma'am just for clarity are you saying a single bus run prek through 12th grade drop off then drop off >> because we did look at that in the transportation study we did three years ago um
024because we were looking at trying to how can we um consolidate routes again looking at the cost and everything and that was one of the biggest findings because I was actually a little bit surprised that there was no cost savings. It was actually going to be a little bit heavier lift at the beginning, but then end up not saving us any money. >> We're all Okay. >> Any questions for Caleb >> board? All right. >> Good job, Caleb. >> All right. You're on to uh Oh, I read I just did the public comment. Sorry. public comment about the budget hearing. >> Yeah, I stole your uh >> I stole your part, Agador and didn't read the legal ease. >> I just jumped right into it and I didn't uh and I didn't read the legal
025ease and I uh stole your portion. I apologize. >> So, I don't need to read that. >> All right, we're on to the consent agenda, which is 601 through 10.02 >> superintendent report. I need a motion to accept consent agenda 601 to 10.02. >> So moved. >> Motion by Beth, second by Kristen. Any discussion? >> Can't be much on it. Oh no, there's not. >> On number 10 other is that uh is that come down from the state or is that internal >> 10.01? 01 approval of new policies. >> Correct. >> So 10.01 um that was this is a brand Oh, I'm sorry. This is brand new. We received this from Anthony Fesano um our district attorney of Garcio and Gerscio and it is where um all schools are mandated state reporters. Um, and now
026this is a new policy to make sure that we have revised our policy to include child abuse in an educational setting, corporal punishment, things like that. That policy has been revised and I and Lisa, correct me if I'm wrong, like 2019 and then 2023. This is now the latest and that's just to make sure we're in compliance. So that's what Anthony sent us. Um, and we just chose not to wait for NISB. Um, so that's why there and then the 10.02 02. Um, we got a late donation um to the junior class um to pay for their junior prom, the DJ. So, we wanted to get that on the agenda so we could accept it. And then there will be a Facebook post from Conland to say thank you to those individuals that donated a
027a large amount of money to the prom. >> That's great. >> Thank you. >> Any other questions? voting. >> Yes. Yes. >> And Justin, yes. Consent agenda passed. Old business. Any old business to come before the board? Hearing none. New business. So, I have something to read. 13.01 Rules of Qualification of Voters. Oh. The vice president or designate will review the meeting rules of order and the qualification of voters. Voting will take place in person on Tuesday, May 18, 2026. >> 19th, >> sorry, Tuesday, May 19th, 2026 at the Eldra Junior Senior High School in Eldridge, New York. Voting will close at 8:00 p.m. Qualifications for voting. One, must be a citizen of the United States. Two must be 18 years of age or over. Three must be a resident of the school district for
02830 days or more preceding the date of the vote. The custodian inspectors along with the district clerk of the vote will oversee the voting. The custodian inspectors will verify all handcounted results of the voting. 13.02. The vice president of the board of ed will read the call of the meeting. Notice is hereby given that a public hearing of the qualified voters of the Eldred Central School District, the school district, a school district of the state of New York located in counties of Orange and Sullivan held at the end central's junior senior high school in the Eldrid Central School District on May 7, 2026 at 6 p.m. prevailing time for the presentation of the proposed budget for the following school year. The budget will be available for review no later than May 5th, 2026 and thereafter
029at both school buildings and the school district office. Notice is further given that the annual meeting of the qualified voters of the school district will be held at the Elwood Junior Senior High School, Elwood, New York on May 19, 2026 closing at 8:00 p.m. Proposition one. Shall the following resolution be adopted to it? Resolve that the annual budget of the Andrew Selro School District for the fiscal year 2026 2027 is hereby adopted and the requisite portion thereof to be raised by taxation on the taxable property of the school district is hereby authorized 20,847,888 to levy taxes thereof. Proposition two. Shall the following resolution be adopted to resolve that the board of education of the Eldred Central School District is hereby authorized to levy taxes annually in the amount of $52,000 for the fiscal year 2026
03027 and to pay over such monies to the board of trustees of the Sunshine Hall free library. Proposition three shall the following resolution be adopted to it. Resolved that the board of education of the entr central school district is hereby authorized to purchase and finance 13 school buses and related equipment at a total cost not to exceed $2,500,000 and shall be raised by levy of a tax to be collected in annual installments with such tax to be offset by state aid available thereof. Therefore, and in anticipation of such tax debt obligations of the school district as may be necessary not to exceed $2,500,000 shall be issued. Election of board of education member. Qualified voters of the Eldridge Central School District are authorized to elect two candidates as a member of the board of education to
031serve. one 4-year term beginning July 1, 2026 and ending June 30, 2030 and one two-year term beginning May 19, 2026 and ending June 30, 2028. Voters may select two candidates or submit names on the right in line on the ballot. Second public comment for whatever you'd like to talk about hearing. None. I need a motion to go to executive session for legal issue. >> Kristen second. >> Justin voting. >> Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. All right. We're going to executive session. We'll be not not be conducting business afterwards. Thank you very much.