By Jeff Lipton
The delayed school-budget vote will allow school districts to know the actual amount of state funding they will receive when preparing their budgets, rather than relying on estimates. This will give district residents a better idea of the property tax burden that approving the budget will entail.
By enabling school districts to accurately account for the additional state aid they will receive, the Legislature has acted responsibly and prudently to provide taxpayers with necessary property-tax relief, said Sen. Dean Skelos (R-Rockville Centre).
The vote delay will only help school districts, however, if the Legislature passes a state budget in the next few weeks.
By a vote of 58-0, the state Senate overrode Pataki's veto of a two-week delay in the vote on Tuesday, April 29, throwing budget timetables and candidate filings into disarray. Filing deadlines for school board candidates were extended from April 21 to Monday, May 5, even though Lawrence had already held its candidates-night forum on April 28.
Hewlett-Woodmere has rescheduled its candidates night from May 5 to Thursday, May 22, at 8 p.m. at the Woodmere Education Center.
In addition, budget hearings, which were originally scheduled for Tuesday, May 6 in both districts, were moved to Tuesday, May 20 in District 14 and Tuesday, May 27 in District 15, since districts must complete their budget documents seven days prior to a public hearing on the budget and copies of the budget must be made available 14 days prior to the vote.
If voters defeat the school budgets at the polls, it will give districts little time to present alternate budgets to voters before July 1, when austerity would kick in and force districts to lose funding for summer programs.
School district clerks were scrambling last week to spread the word, as mandated by law, trying to notify residents in both districts 14 and 15 that the budget vote and school board elections had been delayed. I had to re-do everything that was already done. This is absolutely insane, said Alice Laino, district clerk for the Lawrence schools.
Marie Saxida, district clerk for Hewlett-Woodmere schools, called Wednesday, April 30, the day after the budget delay was announced, a day from hell.
But we're hanging in there, Saxida said. We will do it. I'm just one [clerk]. There's one in every district who is going through the same thing.
She added that she never thought the state would go through with a two-week delay, even though there were rumblings that it was a strong possibility.
This is the first time that it's happened in my 15 years here, Saxida said. It's never happened before and hopefully, it will never happen again.
School districts said they will be forced to incur the costs of sending out new mailings and special notices, alerting voters of the date changes. And legal notices published in newspapers, as required by law, will be published again with the new dates, which the districts count as a costly proposition.
We will be sending a notice out to the entire community to inform them of the fact that the budget date has been changed, Dr. Mark Rosenbaum, superintendent of the Lawrence Public Schools, said at the April 29 Lawrence school board meeting.
We've been doing everything in heaven and Earth to save money, only for it to end up costing more, Dr. Karen Chapman, District 14's assistant superintendent for business, said at the April 29 Hewlett-Woodmere school board meeting. It's almost unbelievable.
But legislators said the delay will be well worth the wait, since millions of dollars will be restored to school districts, reducing the tax burden for residents. Skelos and Assemblyman Harvey Weisenberg (D-Long Beach) announced on Friday, May 2, that more than $1 billion in state school aid had been restored to the Executive Budget, which lawmakers said makes the two-week delay palatable.
Gov. Pataki's proposed executive budget had cut $542,288 in state aid to Lawrence, which would have been 8.19 percent less than the district received last year. The state Legislature added $1,077,172, for a total hike of 6.79 percent in state aid over last year.
In Hewlett-Woodmere, the governor proposed slashing 15.56 percent in state aid, or $687,421, but the Legislature restored about $423,000, for a total reduction of 7.8 percent.
Both Skelos and Weisenberg worked to delay the budget votes, to provide the districts with enough time to accurately account for this restoration and apprise voters of the revised information, according to a press release from Skelos' office.
Both districts got a substantial restoration, which will alleviate the burden on local taxpayers quite substantially, said Tom Dunham, a spokesman for Skelos. I don't think there's any question about it. [Because of the two-week delay] there's a little bit of a procedural headache involved. But from the standpoint of taxpayers in Hewlett-Woodmere and Lawrence, that's a lot of money.
Gov. Pataki has 10 business days to veto the state aid package, which would then require the Legislature to override the veto.
