Tri-Town voters may find a ballot question this year for a tax override to help fund the Old Rochester Regional school budget for fiscal year 2017 to help ease the burden on the towns’ municipal budgets.
Concerned their municipalities won’t be able to cover their share of the Old Rochester Regional fiscal year 2017 school budget, Town administrators, selectmen, and finance committee members from the three towns suggested that ORR administration and school committee members prepare a campaign to persuade Tri-Town residents to vote for an operational override, if necessary.
The school district has been advised to seek new ways outside of the budget to fund essential aspects of the ORR schools’ strategic plan that includes an increase in teachers and programming both for regular and special education.
At a meeting a week prior, town leaders asked school administrators to separate capital projects from the regular budget and look into borrowing to fund them by using freed-up debt payments from a recent loan refinance. On February 10, representatives from the three towns looked over those new budget numbers sans capital expenditures.
School Business Administrator Patrick Spencer also told the group that a list of priorities the schools had submitted last week was now a tad shorter.
“We went back to our needs,” said Spencer. “We made some hard choices, and we took some needs off our list.”
Mattapoisett Town Administrator Michael Gagne said he took a long look at the proposed items and thought it wise for the ORR school administration to draw up a long-term plan for how it plans to fund an array of school programs related to the ORR schools’ new strategic plan, which is a set of five goals to meet the social, emotional, and academic needs of the students over time.
Gagne said, looking at the strategic plan, “There are some very good things in there. A lot of people put a lot of time there.” But there are costs involved in certain aspects of the plan, he noted.
In particular, looking at the region’s proposal to fund a new special education program for students age 18 to 22, Gagne said all three selectmen in Mattapoisett had advocated establishing the program to avoid substantial future costs incurred by sending students to other school districts for the service. But a five-year plan that spells out all the added costs and their respective price tags to present to voters, said Gagne, would be essential.
“Nothing would be worse than to have to send this budget outside the limits of Proposition 2½ and next year we don’t have enough money (again),” said Gagne. “I would rather say (to voters), ‘Hey … this is what these ten items are going to be for your next five years … and this is what you need for one year.’”
What the regional school cannot do, said Gagne, is to ask for a tax override from voters for this year’s budget and then come back next year wondering, what are we going to do to fund the budget now?
“If you can’t fund [the budget] under the tax levy, then you have to do operational overrides,” said Gagne. “If these are significant priorities, then strong arguments have to be made to the policy makers and ultimately the voters. I think they’d want to know the whole picture.”
They have to understand the facts and the minutia of it all, said Gagne. If voters have a dollar amount and they know what the school wants to accomplish, voters might support the regional school budget.
“I absolutely agree that the voters of Mattapoisett would support an increase budget allocation for ORR,” said Old Rochester Regional School Committee member Cynthia Johnson. “I think that they understand that ORR has been perceived as a step child and that we’ve had to work with some real budgetary constraints. I think that they recognize that we need to raise that amount of money to do what we need to do.” She continued, “I think it’s up to us to inform the voters.”
As a regional school, should a tax override be proposed, all three towns would find the ballot question on the ballot. To pass, a minimum of two towns would have to approve the override, even if the measure fails in the third town. This concerned Rochester Town Administrator Michael McCue.
“There should be some consideration if the plan passes in two communities,” said McCue. “That would bury the one town that didn’t pass the override…”
McCue said that third town would have to fund the budget without an override, taking from other areas of the town’s budget, “decimating” the municipality’s budget.
“There needs to be more thought on that,” said McCue.
Marion Finance Director Judy Mooney, who is also acting as town administrator during Paul Dawson’s leave of absence, said that happened to Marion once in the past.
“That’s the town’s decision if they want to decimate their police and fire at the ballot box,” said Mattapoisett Selectman Paul Silva, adding that that was what “democracy is all about.”
McCue later stated, “We (Town of Rochester) do forego an awful lot of things on the municipal side to fully fund as much as possible of the regional side.”
ORR School Committee member Tina Rood suggested the three towns and the ORR schools unite on the override issue, stressing the importance of “moving forward all together.”
“These are priorities and they’re called priorities because they’re important,” said Johnson. “There’s no fluff here…. The things that we’re asking for are important. It’s not willy-nilly…”
Gagne said ORR would have to ‘sell’ the strategic plan and consider all the necessary components of the plan.
“But if there are holes in it, you’re done and the whole ship goes down,” said Silva.
The next meeting for the three towns and the ORR School Committee to hash out the budget is scheduled for February 29 at 4:30 pm in the superintendent’s conference room.
By Jean Perry