Carmichaels looks to bridge budget gap
CARMICHAELS – Carmichaels Area School Board is looking at a $572,000 gap between expenses and revenue in the tentative spending plan for 2002-2003. The board could close that gap by taking money out of the district’s fund balance, according to business manager Vincent Belczyk. However, they discussed cutting as much as possible from the projected expenses by the time they must have a final budget at the end of June.
On a 6-1 vote, the board on Thursday passed the tentative $10.9 million budget for the next fiscal year.
“The $572,000 is a deficit that is what we could still look at in cuts,” said director Linda Krajnak, who cast the lone dissenting vote.
Krajnak recommended trimming $150,000 of that shortfall by moving the money that is in a special fund they pledged toward renovation of the Stan Ferek III Auditorium back to the general fund.
She asked about the status of the project, saying the money should come from a community fund-raising effort that has been in the works. Superintendent James Zalar said the formal action by the board has been to hire an architect, but they have gone no further.
Krajnak made a motion to take the school board’s contribution to the auditorium renovations and put it back into the general fund. The motion died for lack of a second.
“Put it on the June agenda,” said director J.L. Lechner, who gave the budget and finance committee report. “We’re only adopting a tentative budget that is not final, so we could reduce it.”
Lechner said the board, at a recent budget work session, directed the administrators and principals to reduce their proposed expenses to help the board balance the budget. Belczyk said about $500,000 recently was trimmed collectively through a variety of items.
Lechner recommended that the request go back to the administrators and principals to make more cuts, although he and other board members stressed they did not want the educational programs to suffer.
Asked by the board that no property tax millage increase be shown in the budget, Belczyk said the tentative budget includes the withdrawal of the $572,000 gap between expenses and revenue from the fund balance. The total of the fund balance was not immediately available.
Belczyk said the bottom line of the tentative budget expenditures reflects an increase over the 2001-2002 budget of just $15,000.
One large cut reflected in the tentative budget was the removal of $150,000 from a budgetary reserve that Belczyk explained is different from the fund balance and is intended to cover unforeseen expenses. With the cut, the budgetary reserve was reduced to nothing.
During the discussion, Lechner said the school district started the budget preparation process with a proposed spending plan of about $11.6 million before reaching the tentative budget they accepted Thursday at $10.9 million, although $10.8 million was a goal.
Among other matters, the board adopted the Greene County Vocational-Technical School tentative budget of $2.5 million, with Carmichaels’ share at $381,184.72, an increase of $12,000 from the 2001-2002 contribution.