(This is one of several posts covering the 7am Evansville School Board meeting on Tuesday, March 21st.)
Yesterday while on the way to Janesville, I saw a sign that said, "It wasn't raining when Noah began to build the ark." I have to admit I tend to watch for the chinese fortune cookies as well as billboard signs for direction. Anyway, the sign is relevant......
At the opening of the Evansville School Board meeting on Tuesday, a budget analysis was passed out detailing the expenditure Decreases last year: They totaled $180,123. They are listed as follows:
Administrators: -43,065.
Custodial Staff -34,232.
Special Ed trans -25,995.
Substitute costs -25,051.
Temp Borrowing -21,078.
District Office,CESA-14,071.
Maintenance -11,570.
Inaurance,Liability -5,011.
Total Decreases -180.123.
Even given these expenditure decreases, there was a net increase of expenses of 1,040,527. To cover some of this amount, $279,964 was taken from the "Fund Balance."
In essence, in taxpayer terms, this was taken from the saving account. Of the increaes of expenses, it is notable that utiilties alone increased by 22% or $236,771. So---the district did what they said they were going to do and took the hit of energy costs out of the savings. That is not news.
What is news is that one cannot continue that way. Even Noah had to look ahead and began to build the ARK before the rains came.
One of the building blocks for a good ark is knowing what things cost. The first portion of the meeting was spent reviewing how athletic events are budgeted and how the costs of overtime for maintenance and custodial are accounted for. This is important so one can determine what "fee" is right so one does not lose money(in a commercial business). The surprise was that the athletic department gets the revenue from events but the maintenance department pays the expenses, and it turns out an increasing amount of overtime.
This way of accounting is a little like having your older children live at home and keep their paychecks and have you pay all the expenses. Anyway, the bottom line of the discussion was that the true "cost" of an event is not easily seen in the accounting and the board asked that the expenses be matched with the revenue in the future--however no formal board resolution on this was passed so we will see.
In light of this, Art Phillips, asked that the whole matter of increasing the custodial and temporary grounds positions be delayed till the public could be at the meeting. He said that in light of the fact that the Review is not even published till Wednesday, the public was not properly informed of the meeting. He asked that the issue be tabled until the complete numbers could be retreived by Deb Olson. This was voted down.
Mr. Pierick went over the necessity of not taking one item of "saving" and moving it to another budget category. The days of that type of thinking are gone in his view. He offered a compromise proposal that would essentially hold spring and summer grounds costs even with last year. That passed on a 6-1 vote, with Art Phillips dissenting.
As usual, if you attended the meeting and wish to offer corrections or comments, feel free to do so on the comment line.
(Audio of portions of this meeting is coming.)
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I think it's time we (me)start paying a little more attention to these School board meetings.
ReplyDeleteThe School district is the largest portion of our tax bill and it looks like we may have some "voodoo" economics going on.
I would also like to know how they can get away w/ a 7:00am meeting in the middle of the week. Granted there was notice but I would have have had an easier time showing up at Midnight on a Sat. How can they expect concerned citizens to take a day off for this?
Could'nt this have waited? We're talking about grass & custodians for God's sake.
Oh yeah. Thanks Art for looking out for us. Now for the rest of you..........
The school board AND administation is almost worse than my kids with when it comes to money. They see some extra money laying there, and think , we MUST spend it.
ReplyDeleteThanks Art, it takes guts to say NO.
They claimed there was plenty of notice on this meeting. I was one of the few citizen attendees. I have enough flexibility in my job to attend a 7 a.m. meeting but many people can't do that.
ReplyDeleteI thought their claim that hte meeting was well published was laughable. A 7 a.m. meeting on Tuesday that was noticed on the Thursday prior. Sure, they may have done it in the normal fashing, but there wasn't enough time to get the word out to the non-bloggers. I know the blogs in Evansville seem to be quite popular, but my guess is that the Review is probably the more popular way of getting this info (which came out after the meeting). thought it was terribly unfair to the community to have the meeting on such short notice at 7 a.m.
This was the first school board I attended and I agree I should be more involved and will attempt to attend more in the future. As far as "voodoo econnomics" I did get the impression that Heidi Carvin was all too willing to shift line items on unrelated areas rather than really looking at saving dollars (for example shift energy savings to cover maintenance employee expense rather than look at the issue on the table of actually reducing maintenance expense).