After seeing their first budget proposal fall by 33 votes, the Saugerties Central School District’s (SCSD) Board of Education is grappling what to present to the public in mid-June.
Last month, the SCSD saw their $75,173,678 budget proposal for the 2024-25 school year approved by just shy of the supermajority of voters it needed to pass. Because the district sought a tax levy increase greater than their 3.62 limit presented by the state, they needed the approval of 60 percent or greater to succeed; the budget proposal came with a tax levy increase of 4.91 percent. After counting affidavit votes and absentee ballots, the results were 940 votes for the budget proposal, and 690 votes against.
During a meeting of the board of education held on Tuesday, May 29, superintendent Dan Erceg discussed the three options available to the district: They can present the same budget and hope for a better result, present a revised budget at or below the 3.62 percent tax cap, or simply adopt a contingency budget. New York State law prohibits school districts from seeking a third vote, so if the SCSD offered either of the first two options and did not receive the requisite amount of votes, they would be forced to adopt a contingency budget.
A contingency budget only funds contractual expenses, like teachers’ salaries and items deemed by the school board to be ordinary contingent expenditures such as legal obligations, expenses authorized by statute and other items necessary to maintain the educational program, safeguard and maintain property and ensure the health and safety of students.
Unlike a standard budget cycle, districts in New York have less than a month to come back to voters for a second time, leading to a series of critical Tuesdays in June. The deadline to adopt a budget or automatically move to contingency is June 4, followed on June 11 by a public hearing. The public will have their say on Tuesday, June 18. Though the SCSD School Board discussed their options at the May 29 meeting, no firm decisions were made.
The conversation seemed to be split among those who would rather see the same budget presented, and those who leaned toward a spending proposal that came in at or under the tax cap.
“I’d be opposed to any further cuts in the budget since the budget failed by 35 votes,” said board president Robert Thomann. “I’d like to see it put up again.”
Thomann added that impassioned pleas from students and educators at the beginning of the meeting who valued arts programs and other offerings deemed extracurricular would need to be felt at the polls for a budget needing a supermajority to pass.
“I would hope every student over 18 is ready to vote,” Thomann said. “We need more turnout. If it fails and goes to contingency that would be a horror.We’ve been through that…I’ve been through the austerity thing as a parent, and it’s the last place you want to be. I remember giving up my vacation to do fundraising so that kids could have a sports program.”
The SCSD operated under austerity for two years in a row, the second when a revised budget fell by a narrow 1,322 yes, 1,380 no margin in 2011. It happened too long ago for any current student to remember it, but it was still fresh in the minds of many trustees, who felt the long recovery was something Saugerties shouldn’t have to go through again.
“As much as I want to say, put it back out there, my biggest concern is we end up with the austerity budget, where we just lose so much,” said trustee Timothy Wells. “We’re already going to be losing stuff as it is, and the last thing I want is for the music programs to not be there, for us to lose valuable teachers, valuable TA’s, more than we need to.”
Fellow trustee William Ball, previously an ardent supporter of exceeding the cap, agreed, saying that the voter turnout was both low and unpredictable.
“We’d like to think that there’s going to be a groundswell of get out the vote by June 18 and our budget is going to pass,” Ball said. “But in this kind of situation, what we also see — and I think it’s pretty logical if you think it through — is everyone’s going to come out to vote a second time. And that includes the significant portion of the people that voted no. And it includes the people that didn’t vote, a percentage of whom will vote no…And if this vote goes down a second time…contingency is absolutely going to take us backwards years, years, and years. And so I’m not in favor of putting the same budget back up. I’m in favor of putting a budget up that does not exceed the state cap by which we simply need a simple majority, not a 60 percent majority.”
District officials explained that in order to get down to a 3.62 tax levy increase, further cuts will have to be made, even with tapping into $3 million of reserves and fund balance. Erceg explained that the practice is unsustainable, and without a boost in state aid, they would likely have to exceed the tax cap in future budgets as well as this one to avoid potentially calamitous cuts. That’s in part, he said, because the tax cap is partly based on the previous year’s tax levy increase.
“Part of where we are now is because in years past, we didn’t go to the tax cap,” Erceg said. “Because it’s always your baseline for the following year.”
School officials previously noted that passing a budget with a 3.62 percent tax levy increase would equal $4,713 for a home assessed at $300,000, and a 4.91 percent tax levy increase would equal $4,770 for the same home. But it was not enough to get the budget proposal across the finish line. Supporters of presenting the same budget for a second vote believe the district would have to do a better job of getting information out to the public. Whatever the budget proposal looks like, time is running out to get the public up to speed.
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