Feeling the Tax Cap Pinch
To remain under New York State’s tax levy cap, the Amagansett School District would be limited to a .16-percent tax levy increase, or $14,000, in the 2016-17 school year, Eleanor Tritt, the district superintendent, told the school board as its preliminary budget was unveiled on Feb. 23.
In order to keep expenses to a minimum, Ms. Tritt told the board, there will be no transfer to the district’s capital projects fund, a first. Subsequent to the meeting, the preliminary budget was adjusted to eliminate $50,000 proposed toward the purchase of a bus.
“We’ve worked very hard to reduce expenditures as much as possible, to keep the levy as low as possible,” Ms. Tritt said at the meeting. “If you do that, you get to a point where you can’t keep reducing without having a strong impact on programs.”
As of Tuesday, the deadline for the district to announce its intentions as to whether to pierce the cap, “we are over the tax levy cap,” Mr. Tritt said. The preliminary budget, she had told the board, would have the tax levy increasing by 3.47 percent, “even though expenditures only increase by .27 percent, because we don’t have fund balance left over.”
Tuition costs for Amagansett students attending East Hampton High School are expected to total a higher-than-anticipated $2.6 million, Ms. Tritt said. Teachers’ salaries will total $4.4 million, health insurance an estimated $930,000, and retirement systems around $665,000. The proposed tuition rate for a regular education student is $24,539; for special needs students, $68,125. The current charter school tuition rate is $59,000, she said.
Staff salaries will increase by 1.5 percent per contractual agreement. The budget has also changed to reflect a retirement that is no longer anticipated, Ms. Tritt said on Tuesday. “With staffing changes, people going out on leave, people moving, others coming in, you’re constantly adjusting the budget for changes. Also, you have situations where someone might get married and go from single to family health insurance.”
“We’ve worked very hard to develop programs for our children to help them be successful,” she said. “Our goal is to maintain those programs.” With minimal state aid, which the superintendent called “a very small fraction of our revenue” — and even that expected to be less than initially indicated — the district can only turn to the tax levy, she said. “We have always given back the fund balance to try to keep the tax levy low. But because the tuition expense is more than originally known, we don’t have the amount of fund balance to give back.”
The number of tuition students will increase in the coming years, Mr. Tritt said. Nine will graduate this year, while next year 16 will. “The flux of changes is so dramatic,” she said. “Many of our new students actually were not born in Amagansett, but move into the district.” In 2010, for example, “we had 15 new additional tuition students from October to November. It’s the kind of situation we have to accommodate.”