001Okay, welcome. Anybody in the audience have anything to talk about that's on the agenda? Okay, that's a no. And now we're going to go right into the budget presentation. Do I need a Motion to open. I need a motion to open. Make a motion. I need a second. >> I second. All in favor? Yeah. Okay, let's go. Mr. Delagi, you're up. He's up? Thank you, Lisa, for setting me up here. Let's see if we got the little laser. Uh Good evening. Tonight is the third budget presentation that we have. And the areas that you see in front of you, which is the district business district and business office, security department, transportation, facilities, also covering personnel and benefits, debt service and reserves, and then also a brief on the tax levy. Um just so that everybody
002is aware, uh well, first, I'll go over everything that we do in the budget process, and everything is related to our Tucker mission statement that we always follow, the nurturing, fostering, encouraging, and promoting. And it is a zero-based budget. That means that every department has to come in and justify what their expenses are. Uh just so that also, cuz I'll talk about the explaining the budget codes, all of these presentations, once they have been finished, are up on our district website. So, if I go if my Brooklyn speed speaking starts to get kicking in over my Long Island speaking of a little bit slower, you could always go back or ask questions throughout the presentation. Uh but all [snorts] the presentations will be on the district website underneath the business page, the business department. Uh
003as you could see here, the vote that we go over uh the budget vote is over the A funds. That is strictly what we what we vote on, the the public. You also have what's called C funds, H funds, F funds, and V funds, which are different areas such as capital projects, debt service that thankfully we don't have fund for that. Uh cafeteria fund, which is your lunch fund, and then the special aid fund, which can can contains all of your federal or state grants. You'll see that they start off they all start off with four digits. These are the specific areas that they start off and then it's broken down into other specific areas. So, the first area we'll get into is the district office. You'll notice here there is a a slight decrease
004in our top line and then there's an increase as you go down a little further. Um this is BoardDocs. It's a a system we already have the BoardDocs program, but this is a more advanced system. So, you'll see a decrease up top in which the increase is at the lower number. BoardDocs originally was purchased through the company. That's the reason why there was what's called a 400 code. The reason why you see the increase 490 codes, anytime you see those three numbers at 490, that means that it's serviced and runs through BOCES. Um again, not much change as you could see for the rest of the program. When you switch over to the business office, there's not much change, but the increase of $42,000 is basically in these two areas that you'll see at the
005bottom. That's unallocated insurance, and that's with the New York State Insurance Reciprocal. That's our insurance for everything that we have. And then uh which and then our property and casualty insurance. One of the areas that has caused a significant increase is the amount of different claims, not that we have had, but that have gone on throughout New York State. And nice here is a group of it's basically we're part of a group of school districts within New York State that self-insures. So that's the reason for the increase that we have. The other one is a BOCES and men fee. Every school district on Long Island pays one. Our at men fee goes to Eastern Suffolk BOCES. And that's for their budget which can which uh includes their properties and also includes their administrative component. The
006next area we'll look at is security and transportation. We're looking our budget maintains our security staff. It also our cameras throughout the district. And we're also updating the the walkie-talkies that we have throughout the district. And it also maintains the security training that our staff goes through. As it relates to transportation, we have to maintain the same number of routes. Some people might ask, they say, "Well, look, if enrollment gets lower, can we can we knock off one or two of the buses that we have?" Actually, a number of years ago, you did decrease the amount of routes that you had. But the other part you have to realize here, even though our numbers have gone down a little bit, the mileage that you have, your square mileage out here in the Mattituck school district
007that also contains part of Laurel, is still a significant amount and we like to keep the routes under a time of 45 minutes. If you start canceling some of the routes, with the size, your routes become extremely longer. We also want to continue our positive relationship with our bus carrier. You will see throughout Nassau and Suffolk counties, one of their budget areas that have had significant increases is in the area of transportation. Our transportation um contract is going up by CPI. Other school districts have gone up anywhere from 15% to 20% to 30% on just transportation alone. So, we are extremely lucky to have Sunrise Bus Company as our main distributor for our transportation. And then we also continue different shuttles that we have with our with our own buses and van service. Good, Jolly.
008Yes. >> How many different routes do we have on the busing? We have 12 routes that we do for our school. Um that's that's we have. We also have different routes that our vans do, and that's for some special ed services, and we also have out-of-district routes that we have to have that we utilize our vans. But, 12 routes cover what we have both at CE, and then those 12 routes also are at our secondary level. Thank you. Sure. The next area of operation of plant, you'll see the dec- uh the decrease that's there is in cameras because we have actually updated a significant amount of our cameras, and this number here, anytime you see a number that starts with a two, that's equipment, which means that that piece of equipment, every every individual item
009must be at least $500 or more. You cannot buy if you're below that, that's a supply. But, our equipment is in great shape, and we don't we don't foresee a significant amount of increases on our cameras cuz we have the place pretty well covered. You do see a little bit of an increase on the consulting and licensing fees. That again, that's a moderate increase, not significant. The next area that I talked about was transportation, and as you could see uh if you are another district, you would love to have a slide that only went up $67,000 in transportation. Again, I can't say enough about our carrier Sunrise, and our increase is via CPI. That's consumer price index. The next department that we're going to cover is facilities, and Mr. Kelly is here in the audience
010that we could torture if we have any questions. Uh there were many updates that we had during the 2025-2026 school year. We had our project in which we wanted to have AC in all of our rooms, LED lighting, which we ended up getting rebates on, and a shade program that we had all the shades. We're also having uh we're also in the middle of our painting program that should go for 5 years this year, too, uh that we'll be going into that we'll have every classroom in the district painted. We also during the during the 2025-2026 year, we ended up updating the beautiful cupola outside in the front of the building of this building right here. We updated the bathrooms at Cutchogue West. Nobody needs to see the pictures again of what they used to
011look like. Um we also we go back and forth on the seal coating of the parking lots. So, we had seal coated the high school in Cutchogue West. You'll see below that we'll be seal coating uh Cutchogue East in next year's budget, and also continuing the classroom program. And then we also uh right behind some of these chairs, and also up there, we have new railings that we put in um in this auditorium. The at Cutchogue West, there also was a ramp that you'll see in the picture down here below. Uh that's at the side of Cutchogue West, and it's a handicap ramp that we actually did in-house. Our staff did. So, again, great job there. How it relates on the numbers for our facilities, you'll see it really translates into different areas that we're
012looking at. The operation of plant, you see Cutchogue East is the LED uh lighting and shade program along with air conditioning that decreased, so there's a significant amount of a drop-off there. And also our contractual, because much of our work is actually being done in-house. So, that's the savings we always talked about whenever we had our maintenance mechanic increase in staff. The other area that we're looking at, uh the seal coat in the [clears throat] parking lot as I showed you, bounces back and forth between buildings. So, just so you know, like the third anytime that you see the numbers 10 at the end, that is Cutchogue East. Anytime you see 20, that's our junior senior high school. And anytime you see the number 90, that is district-wide. So, that's monies that could be used
013either at the district office or throughout the district on any one of their buildings. And here we go on the last page, the simple the operation of plant, the health and safety services. That's just a decrease in the BOCES line. We actually have the increase in other areas. Next, you look at personnel and benefits. This is the slide that usually goes up and creates the significant amount in your um of your budgets. So, with a staff of close to 200 uh well, over 200 people, there is the in- the largest increase is your salaries, but again, that is also the large by far your largest dollar amount in your entire budget, with over $22 million. That, because of whatever you have and and what your salaries are. The next two lines are ERS and TRS.
014Those are the retirement systems. So, for every dollar spent as it relates to teachers, teacher assistants, and that that goes into a TRS fund that is run by the state. You pay a percentage, and anything that you have employees that many of the employees that we have in CSEA, with the exception of the teaching assistants, they are all part of the ERS system, which you will also see sometimes is NYSLRS, and that's the that's the employee retirement system. The percentages you're going to see whenever you go over the tax levy cap, but the teachers retirement system is a smaller number it percentage-wise than ERS, but it's a more significant number for the salaries. The other one that you'll see down there, and this is what all school districts see, health insurance. This is something we
015have NYSHIP, n y s h i p, and that's the insurance rates that have gone up. So, they've gone up significantly over the years. They had one year where there was actually a little bit of a pull back, and that pull back happened right after they had given a significant increase earlier on. So, they gave you a little bit of pull back and then came back up again. So, again, um if anybody ever thought during the COVID time that everything was free and covered by federal monies and all that, you know, this shows that you're always going to be paying down the road for these different services that come up. The next area that we're looking at is debt service. Just so that you're aware, you have an energy performance contract that we pay for
016until the 2028 uh or you pay for the last payment in the 2028-2029 budget. Those numbers are the third uh they're the fourth and fifth that you'll see there on the energy performance contract. As the years go on, that number will remain consistent. The only part is you'll be paying more on the principal than on the interest cuz you're on the back end of those numbers. The serial bond program that you have, that falls off, that's the 29-30 year. And that's the bond that you had and you again you will see that the principal ends up going up with the interest as it decrease. And that will go down a little bit as the years go on. Uh but that will be paid off in the 29-30 year. The third one that you see there
017uh TANs. A TAN is called a tax anticipation note. And that's money's that you end up borrowing to get you through the time until your money comes in from the taxes that you get from the taxpayers. Um those money's start in January. We've heard that the money's going to come flying in on January for the from the assessor's office uh with us and it goes throughout the year it's paid to us. What you have to have in in place of that money is cuz you start your staff in September and other staff work in July and August, you have to have money's that cover that. Some of that is covered by reserves and other money that you have to go out and borrow. What we have done here, the the part that we initiated a
018few years ago, is that money we will borrow a significant amount of money in the beginning of the year, which we've actually decreased from 7 million down to 6.5 million. And we end up paying back 4 million of it right after the January break in February cuz we have other money's coming in. And then we pay interest on the remaining 2.5 million until the end of the year whenever it's comes up. Uh we do we do that because we feel that it is a waste if you're paying interest on that other money and it's sitting in your reserve. Um also so that you know, there's a word called arbitrage. So, you cannot make extra money on the money you borrow. There's a limit of a thousand dollars. If you make over that, you go into
019what's called arbitrage in which they could take back two dollars for every dollar you made. So, that's the reason why we do these fun things. So, I just want to give you a brief lesson on these fun things and and again, I don't know if we call them fun, but at least the different parts that we have as it relates to borrowing. Now we talk about reserves and fund balance. A reserve is a separate account that's established by the school district to finance various district cost and is specific to just those costs. You'll see that on the next slide. An annual fund balance is the difference between what your actual revenues are and your actual expenditures. They could be positive, they could be negative. Thankfully, you look you always want them to be positive. And
020then what do you do with a positive annual fund balance? What our choice has been is we have put it the majority of it into a capital reserve and you also fund some of your other reserves. There's an unassigned reserve that you also have that you can use for anything, but the limits that the state has in it and we still follow what the laws are is 4% of what your budget is and you'll see that also on the next slide. Um the reason why we have funded the capital reserve is because whenever we're doing capital projects, we're trying to make it so that we'll get voter approval to use these funds and if we use by using these funds, we are not affecting the tax rate to the taxpayers and in the community. That's
021always a positive, I've heard. Um the other part that have to understand is strong reserves greatly help offset borrowing amounts needed. And that's the TANs that I spoke about. So, you like to decrease the amount of money that you have to spend on TANs. And then it also does another thing where Moody's or any Standard & Poor's every now and then they do bond ratings on school districts. So, we have an extremely high bond rating. You like to maintain that. The higher your bond rating for every level up is probably 25 basis points less whenever you're borrowing. Just so that people know basis point is simply what your percentage is. A 25 basis points is 0.25% of whenever you borrow money. So, that would helps it decrease the amount that you're borrowing. These are our
022reserves as of June 30th, 2025. The external auditor always reviews your books at the end and this you will always see in your financial statements. We also our district, we always feel that it's very important to to post all of our financial statements. You know, there's no reason to hide anything. Uh you know, and if you are then that's a problem. But over here, I always kid around whenever uh Shawn first looked at this with me, I'm like just go to page 12. It's that book that you have around 80, 90 pages and they're like, "Well, what's all this?" It's just It's either 12, sometimes it's 13, you know, sometimes they want to the company wants to tell more about themselves, so it might be page 14, but that's the part where it tells you
023about the reserves, tells you about your revenues, it tells you about your expenditures, it tells you about your budget. And you always want that to be close. Yes, >> there a limit to the amount of reserve you can have? Some of some of the reserves do have limits. That's That's excellent question. So, to give you an idea, workers compensation, that's a reserve that you could load as much as you like. Same with unemployment. The teachers retirement reserve can only go up by 2% each year. So, that's one. Employee retirement serve reserve, there is no limit on that. So, you'll see many of your school districts with significant reserves have that as an extremely high number. The next one is sometimes you'll hear it as ABLAR, the employee benefit accrued liability. That's payouts for people whenever
024they are leaving your district, whether it be dismissal where money is owed or retirement, and it has to relate specifically to their sick bank or vacation bank. It cannot be used for any other type of payouts. And that usually is limited to a certain dollar amount. They We have to do this beautiful nice page report that goes over and gives you what the ABLAR number is, and you try to fund it up to ABLAR. And many districts at the time could be over ABLAR. And it's something you try not to be, but I will say when dire times came up a little over a decade ago, the one thing they said all the people who funded it to that level or below, they were still stuck there with that level. The state came out and
025said, "Anybody who funded over it, well, you could take that money out. Don't worry and help save yourself." So, the people who didn't do it right were saved, and the people who did it right, you know, you got to deal with the state budget that went up 1%. So, but that's ABLAR. Repair reserve is There's not a limit on it, but there is a limit to what you can use it on. As you could find anytime there's anything where you require permits, the attorneys will take away what they say in repair, and they will tell you you must use your capital reserve. And then your capital reserves Go ahead, please. >> like when we did the cupola, I never understood why you couldn't repair that as opposed to Yeah. Well, that's that's the part that
026we wanted to we wanted to use the repair reserve for the cupola. The reason why you were not permitted to use the repair reserve for the cupola is because you needed permits and you had to close off an area. And then once you do that, it's considered a capital project. >> So, it's Tom Kelly's fault. It's it's not Tom always Tom always Tom does such great repairs that we don't even have to use the repair reserve. Thank you, Tom. So, and then the capital reserve, that is this one here, that's our total and that's actually two different reserves that we have in capital. You will have voter approval to start a reserve up and we've done that two different times to fund up to 10 million and you have a certain amount of time to
027use that money. So, on one of the funds we have uh 5.4 million, I think, and the other one we have a little over 4 million. And the third little bit is like a four or five hundred thousand dollar part. That's the payment where you ended up paying off the cupola. So, remember, this number here, 9.9 million, is as of June 30th, 2025. The cupola payments were made in July, August, and September of those months. So, it will have decreased. And everything for the capital reserve, we have to put out for a vote. >> Yes, you end up putting that when it It's usually whenever you're putting it on your tax uh going for your uh tax levy each year, you include that as a separate proposition. And you said that those two are up
028at different times, the 4.something and the other one? Yeah, there's a tech Usually it's like a 10-year window that you have to use the reserves. But just so that you know, on one of the capital reserves, if you're coming out and with different funds, if you still see that you have those funds, you can actually collapse one into the next one. As long That's why you keep on making sure that you have a capital reserve approved by the voters. The other part that you see is an appropriated fund balance of $250,000. That's a minimal amount and that's something that we would use on on the the revenue side of the budget to offset expenses, but usually what we have is we we've got a good enough cushion in between and we've been able to build
029up our reserves. So, we haven't had to touch that. And the unassigned fund balance, that's the 4% that you're allowed to keep up to in that one code. All of these items, just so you know, they don't just take my math or the math of the business department. They're also vetted by the treasurer that we bring in and also by the the external auditors, not the internal, but the external. Cuz the external auditors come every year to review your books. The next, this is the part where everybody's like, "Charlie, why didn't you just get to this part?" All right. This is what you're talking about as far as your tax your tax levy cap. We'll see that number on the top. And then what you're looking at going out now. So, we've gone out with
0302.74, 2.91, 2.97 in the last 3 years. This one is down to 2.63. Whenever I first came in, I was trying to explain to you how you like that leveling process cuz you had a number of years where they would go low and high. When you start doing that, it it seems like a heartbeat. All right. A heartbeat is good to have when we're out here. All right. When we get hooked up. It's not good to have when you're doing a budget. All right. When you get those spikes in that. So, now you're at a point where it's leveling right to an area where you're keeping that that or actually decreasing it over time. So, we're in we're in we're in pretty good shape here, and it's a 2.63% increase. Here's the way it breaks
031down with numbers. Your budget to budget is 3.19%. Your estimated tax levy that you have, you know, it might go up it might go up if Tony knocks over one of the tables, but if we don't we keep those tables set, we're still in good shape, and it's 2.63. I didn't want to give you that much heart failure looking at that number. I'm very sorry. But, yeah, it's uh the 2. the 2.63. And I will have to say with our desks we've almost toppled them over at least 15 times this year, and we've still got a great record with 15 15 for 15 on saves. So, that brings us to Tuesday, May 19th. That's when the budget vote is. Uh there will be an approval of the budget. It will be up for your approval
032at the next board meeting. That's whenever you vote to approve. That gets filed with the state with it, and that's the property tax cap. Gets filed with the state. Also, other documents get filed with the state and approved once you approve the budget. And then there is a budget hearing on May 12th, and then the vote is on May 19th. There's also a 6-day notice that goes out to the public, everybody here, immediately following the budget whenever you have the budget hearing. And that's all she wrote. Any other questions you have? Doug, do you have any other questions? >> No. Somebody? No. Okay, thank you. As always, Charlie, and please thank everybody in your office that helps out. Yes, they do a great job. Okay, now we're up to audience communication. If there's anybody in
033the audience that has anything other than agenda items or agenda, feel free. Okay, now I need a motion to adjourn. So moved. Need a second. Second. All in favor. Aye. Good night. Thank you.