001Good evening, tonight's a very exciting night for me. It's the night that the board will hopefully approve the budget for 2026-27. There is a resolution on the agenda after the presentation for that. Um, there's also a resolution for the board to adopt the property tax report card and the school budget notice. That's actually the important part right there is for the board to adopt that property tax report card because we then report it to New York State. And after that we're able to put all of our budget documents together and have them available for the public and for the budget hearing which will be on May 7th. So the budget has not changed since we presented it last in March. You'll see the summary on the screen here at the top part of the screen
002are our expenditures and the bottom part is the revenues. The budget for next year is 67.3 million which is a 3.66% increase or 2.4 million. As I said this is the same budget that we presented in March. So I'll just point out two of the significant changes in the expenditures. First of all you'll notice that the equipment at the equipment line increased by 11.4%. The reason for that is that we added the car kit for the winter circle program into equipment. The rest of that program is paid for through BOCES and also we reallocated some money from contractual. We moved it into equipment so that we can purchase some furniture and shelving for the high school at the library or the high school library. That's not new money. It was just a reallocation. I I
003do know we talked earlier about the employee benefits and how the health insurance was increasing nearly 10%. However, all benefits overall are just increasing 3.2%. The other benefits other than health insurance include our pension costs and also our payroll costs. At the bottom of the screen you'll notice the revenues. I do have some slides regarding the tax levy increase which I'll talk about. We are at the maximum amount allowed under the law that 3.6% increase. The state aid that you see here is based on the governor's proposal. As you may know the state has not yet passed their budget. If there are any changes to the state aid after the state passes their budget it'll be minimal and could just provide a little extra money that would go into our into our revenues at that
004time. If we don't spend that money it would fall to fund balance but we're not expecting any big changes on the state level. So this slide shows the three-part component budget. We are required to show that for the public. Also attached tonight's agenda under the resolution to adopt the budget is the three-part budget the line by line detail. That information will actually become part of our budget book. We do show every account code broken down as either admin program or capital. And then this slide here just shows some of the factors that go into the tax cap calculation. As I stated our tax cap increase for next year is 3.61%. That is the maximum amount that we're allowed to levy. In order for the budget to pass we would need to have a 50% approval
005rating. If we went over the maximum amount we would have to have a 60% approval rating. And the components of the tax cap calculation are actually listed here. The consumer price index change. That's really the inflationary factor. In 2025 the change in CPI was 2.63% but New York State limits that in the tax cap calculation to 2%. So every school district in New York State is using 2% as that part of their calculation. Another factor that's included here is the tax base growth factor. That represents an actual physical change in the properties not simply an increase in assessments. That's different for every school district in New York State but New York State does provide that information to every school district. For Red Hook it's 1.02% for next year. And then overall our tax cap increase
006can be looked at what's the increase for operations and what what do we have in the increase for capital. So we show that at the bottom of this slide. 2.98% of that 3.61% is for operations and 0.63% is for the capital portion of the budget. This slide here we also went over this at the last meeting too. This is the actual calculation for the tax cap calculation. The tax base growth factor and the allowable levy growth factor that I just talked about as well as changes for the capital exclusion part of the calculation and pilots which are payments in lieu of taxes are applied to the current year levy to determine the maximum allowable tax levy which for next year would be the 42.7 million dollars which is listed at the bottom which represents that
0073.61% increase. You know I do know I went through that quite quickly but we didn't make any changes since last time and I'm happy to answer any questions that the board may have. I just go ahead. No, I just want to say thank you. You know our district and budget are in good standing especially during a time when so many of our neighboring districts are not. I appreciate that. Thank you.