WESTERLY — The Board of Finance is proposing a $98.78 million combined education and municipal budget for 2022-23, a 3.16% increase from the current spending plan. Taxes would increase by 2.54% under the board’s proposal.
The board officially transmitted the budget to the Town Council on Monday following workshops held over an eight-day period with school officials and Town Manger Shawn Lacey. The council, which has final authority on bottom line for both municipal and education budgets, will conduct an anticipated marathon review session Saturday, followed by public hearings later in the month.
The council could accept the finance board’s recommendation, make deeper reductions or even restore funds.
The Board of Finance left Lacey’s recommended general government and capital budgets in tact, but reduced the School Committee’s recommended budget by $402,424, roughly half of the proposed increase in tax dollars to support the town’s public school system. The School Committee’s proposed budget called for an appropriation of local tax funds of $50,025,674, a $966,211 or 1.97% increase in spending over the current budget.
The finance board’s proposed budget includes $57.62 million for education, $23.9 million for general government, $1.44 million in subsidies to local non-profit organizations, $996,000 for municipal capital projects and $1.6 million for capital projects at district schools.
Lacey’s proposed consolidated budget, which included the entire request made by the School Committee, amounts to a 3.59% overall increase from the current consolidated budget of $95.07 million, and would require a tax increase of 3.2%.
In his transmittal letter to the Town Council and Board of Finance, Lacey explained that his recommended plan included a proposed wage increase for unionized town employees and a 2.5% increase for non-union employees. The pay increases are needed, Lacey said, to address difficulty in recruiting and retaining workers.
The proposed municipal capital projects budget includes $421,000 for a new public works storage facility as well as funding for projected future technology upgrades. The budget also includes $1.23 million as part of the municipal vehicle replacement program.
Board of Finance Chairman Stephen K. Lynner focused on the education budget during remarks he made during the Town Council’s meeting on Monday. State funding assistance for the school district decreased by about 10.3 percent over the course of the past five years and the appropriation of local tax dollars for education increased by about 4.2% during the same period of time, Lynner said.
“Over time that doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t reconcile itself unless they can demonstrate, and we’ve asked them, that inherent in the way they view the necessity for funding their mission is somehow at variance with the way [the state] views the obligation,” Lynner said.
The formula the state uses to determine how much financial assistance each district in the state receives is based both on student enrollment and “a community’s ability to fund education,” Superintendent of Schools Mark Garceau said Tuesday.
In other words, Garceau said, while the district has experienced a decline in student enrollment that has been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of students is not the only factor in the state’s formula. Local education officials expect student enrollment to increase once parents who opted to home school during the pandemic feel it is safe to send their children back to school, Garceau said.
Councilor Caswell Cooke Jr. said he would support giving the School Committee the full increase it asked for if school officials provide several years worth of statistics on the number of school employees as compared with student enrollment. He suggested data going back to the 1970s would be useful. Additionally, he said he wanted school officials to justify some of the district’s administrative positions.
Garceau said he and his staff would provide all information the Town Council requests but noted that state and federal laws regarding special education and other mandated positions have changed over decades and now require certain positions that were not previously required. Garceau said that decreases in student enrollment do not have a direct correlation to the number of teachers that are needed in the district. The district has reduced its employee base by more than 59 positions since 2019.
Councilor Christopher Duhamel noted that both the education and the municipal government budgets are proposed to increase.
