I wanted to take a moment to look back while we are all looking forward to the Act 34 hearings in February.
In May 2009 I posted the following regarding my no vote for the 2009-2010 budget:
I've posted a number of times about the budget, about voting "no", about the high school, and many other topics under sun. There are people out there that get what I am saying. I am not on this Board for my own glorification. If I was, boy did I ever pick the wrong venue for that. I don't vote no just because I like to go against the grain. Honestly, it's not easy to vote against something. It is much easier to be FOR something. I don't take these votes lightly, however, I think many people do.
Take the budget for one example. Are you prepared to have your taxes raised 30-50% over the next five years? Think about that for a second. Our budget puts us on a path to increase taxes from 23.81 (last year) to 34.98 in 2014-2015. That increase depends on what rate we get on our high school bonds, the cost of the high school project (this number is based on $100 million) and what return the PSERS investments get. The increase may get bigger or it may come down if the stars align. As an example, if you own a $200,000 house in Mt Lebanon, your taxes are projected to go from $4,762 all the way to $6,996. A $400,000 home will go from $9,524 to $13,992.
Ask yourself if you really think those tax increases are going to attract young families to Mt Lebanon. When I moved here in 2004 and looked at competing school districts, communities, and places to raise my kids, Mt Lebanon was one of three places I thought would work. And I was right about that. My family loves it here. We are proud when we escort our out-of-town relatives to the different places in Mt Lebanon that make it unique. We go to the parks, Beverly, Washington Rd, our beautifully restored elementary schools, and the list goes on and on. People moving to Pittsburgh all do what I did. They look at the overall quality of life in any prospective community.
When I vote on that budget, I don't just look at what is happening this year (a .30 mill increase) because honestly, what happens on a year to year basis fluctuates so much. But when you see the impact that your decision is going to have on future families that are evaluating Mt Lebanon much the way my family and I did in 2004, you have to have a bit of perspective. The impact the Board will have TODAY on the decisions made by unknown families five years from now is staggering. After talking with a few Board member off-the-record, I know that there are more people on the Board that get the fact that putting us on the course to a possible 50% tax increase makes this budget unsustainable. But there is a bit of a fear of inevitability. That we can't actually avoid those increase. I completely disagree with that assessment. As a Board we hardly looked deep into the budget to find cost savings. We never did sit down and prioritize our budget objectives. We never did implement a process to start a zer0-based budget and we never did get the programmatic budget that was asked for after last years budget passed.
Until we can sit down and look at our expenses based on programs and until we can sit down and start every budget year over at a zero number, then I fear this Board will not have the ability to avoid the large tax increases coming.
We hear every day in the news today about school districts cutting staff (see Sto-Rox), cutting classes, closing schools (see City of Pittsburgh), asking teachers to forgo raises, etc. Mt Lebanon has largely been able to avoid most of that economic fallout. It is for this reason that I believe the community thinks things are fine- that the District has sounded an "all-clear" signal that those types of things simply won't fall on us. People by their very nature are optimistic for the most part- this is very much the same as what I said earlier, that people want to be FOR something and not against something. I don't know at what point residents in Mt Lebanon will start to figure out that 50% in property tax increases will start to erode their everyday lives, but it will happen. I might not be on the school board at that point but I will proudly say that I voted against these budgets and that I was unwilling to sit idly by and say nothing while it all happened.
A couple of problems I have with the budget this year:
1) Last year you may remember that I said we should try to maintain current teacher/student ratios. For the 2008-2009 budget we projected a drop in student population of 63. Well, it turns out that we were wildly inaccurate. We actually dropped 122 students or almost 100% more than projected. Last year we attritioned four teaching positions partly due to this enrollment issue. This next year we are again looking at a student population decline of about 35, however, we are not projected to lose any staffing positions. This is 157 students lost in 2 years and we are only losing 4 positions- all last year. There is something very wrong with this. Granted there are some issues with where the retirements are coming from this year and with only a handful of retirements throughout the District, it is hard to find efficiencies. But we MUST find them. That is our job and the job of the administration.
2) Funding of a PSERs Rate Spike Stabilization Fund- We are taking $500,000 of taxpayer money and putting it aside so that taxpayers will not get hit with the full one-year impact of the PSERS increase in 2012 (see story here). To me, this is the height of wasteful use of money. Setting this money aside does nothing to reduce future millage increases, it simply defers when you will see it. If we were to take this money, have it sit in a money market fund at .5% interest, it would be more beneficial over the long-term to our taxpayers than to use it to manufacture a level increases in taxes for PSERS. With the high school project staring us straight in the face, it makes all the sense in the world to use this money to INVEST in the high school project to reduce how much we will pay in debt service for the next 3o years. You take this money, you take the $175,000 we have saved in our latest capital projects (from bids coming in under estimate) and you start to invest all that money into a project that is going to be around a while- just like the high school. Heck, aren't we having issues with just a six-lane pool being installed at the new athletic wing? I wonder if half a million dollars would get us an extra couple lanes? I wonder if half a million dollars would allow us to expand that building a bit to build a stretch pool? I wonder what half a million dollars would do for our science wing? For our language arts classrooms? For turfing a field? For putting lights at Mellon? Any and all of these ideas are a better use of $500,000 than to level out a millage increase in my opinion.
3) Zero-based/Program Based Budget- We are still not looking at a budget that starts from scratch every year. Any time you get a base budget and increase items by a percentage every year (yes this is a simplistic way to explain it but is largely true) then you run the risk of a budget that gets out of control much like the Federal Government. We need to find a way to priortize every expense and we can only do this if we know the cost of everything in our budget.
Those are the reasons I voted against this budget. I don't feel comfortable approving a budget that sets us on a path to tax people out of Mt Lebanon or to tax so much that young families refuse to relocate here. We can do better than this and I think we owe it to our taxpayers to do better than this.
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The situation we find ourselves in now was not hard to see coming. Unfortunately, we took no action to avoid it.
Thanks for reading.
James
