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School board finance committee talks potential tax increase

By BRIAN FERRY

bferry@timesobserver.com

Warren County School District may raise taxes next year, but most likely not more than 3.3 percent.

At the meeting of the board’s finance committee Monday night, the committee members passed along a recommendation to the full board that it not raise taxes above the index provided by the state. Districts may only raise taxes above the state-set index through referendum or in under certain exceptions.

That 3.3 percent equates to 1.8261 mills, according to Director of Business Services Jim Grosch, or $730,000 in new revenue for the district.

“Let’s put that on the consent agenda, that the board won’t raise the tax by more than the index,” Committee Chairman Arthur Stewart said.

Grosch provided a ‘rough-cut’ budget to the committee with expenditures of $80,815,171 and revenues of $78,538,655 — a projected deficit of almost $2.3 million.

Last year, the board approved a budget with a projected shortfall of $1.5 million. That budget included a max-allowable tax increase of 1.8 mills. On Monday, Grosch said the actual shortfall was $86,517.

The difference was in the expenditure side of the budget.

The district’s actual and projected expenditure budgets for 2017-2018 were very close. According to Grosch, the burn rate for the year was 99.99 percent.

Audit

The district heard good news from auditor Buzz Felix of Felix & Gloekler.

“A standard, unmodified, clean opinion has been issued,” Felix said. “We didn’t find anything.”

While there were no problems with the budgeting, there are problems ahead with the budget.

“The big gorilla in your budget is your pension costs,” he said.

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