The Warren County School District is preparing to move forward with a budget with a tax increase.

On Monday, the finance committee of the school board asked Director of Business Services Jim Grosch to prepare a budget with a half-mill tax increase for the board’s consideration.

That was a fairly direct response to Grosch’s announcement that the district would lose $221,206 in local real estate tax revenue compared to last year by not raising taxes.

He said the county’s property values dropped by almost $4 million – from almost $460 million to almost $456 – from 2021-2022 to 2022-2023.

The largest cause of the decrease was tax appeals, Grosch said.

That reduction would lead to the district collecting $221,206 under the current millage – 55.3371.

The district is not looking at a windfall if the board approves the half-mill increase.

“A half-mill… really keeps us flat with respect to last year,” Grosch said. “That increase would get us an increase, year-over-year, of $6,739.”

The committee asked Grosch to show them a document with a half-mill increase for their consideration as the final budget – which must be approved by the end of June.

“The budget’s set to be approved on June 27,” he said. “I could come with half-a-mill and a zero increase. There’s plenty of time to change your mind if you so choose.”

The district is trying to finalize a budget without detailed information on revenues from state and federal sources.

“We haven’t heard anything on revenues… final allocations,” Grosch said.

“We are not getting any information about the budget at all,” Superintendent Amy Stewart said.

“Eventually we are going to have to publish a budget,” committee chairman Arthur Stewart said. “The only variable that we have at our disposal is the millage rate. We could go negative, we could go zero, we could go positive.”

I don’t think we have much of a choice.

“I’ve always been wanting to keep it at 0,” board member Marcy Morgan said. “If we could just keep up a little bit and it’s not too hurtful to our community, I would be on board with that.”

“I’d like to see it move forward with a half-a-mill increase, just so we have an understanding of where we’re going,” committee member Jeff Dougherty said.

“This is the one time during the year that we have the ability to increase taxes,” committee member Donna Zariczny said. “It never gives us the opportunity to do so again if we don’t. By no fault of our own, we’re going to be in a deficit of $221,206. If we increase by half-a-mill, we can balance that back out.”

“I’m in favor of putting forward the final budget with a half-mill increase,” Zariczny said.

Grosch offered a document that showed the impact of that possibility to property owners.

On a property with an appraised value of $60,000 – or an assessed value of $30,000 – “it increases their annual taxes by $15,” he said.

“I don’t think people understand the money involved,” board member Mary Passinger said.

She said the idea of a tax increase is frightening to some, but “if you say to them, it’s going up $15 for the year…” the idea would not be so unpalatable.

The committee chairman opposed the idea of increasing taxes. “It’s not much of a difference but I can’t get behind a tax increase this year,” Arthur Stewart said. “We have not gone through the add and deduct process” that the board typically goes through.

Further, he referred to a 2017 Erie School District crisis that the state government responded to by sending an additional and recurring $14 million to the district.

“I can’t release from my grip that the experience that the state had with the Erie School District… because they had difficulty,” Stewart said.

He also said the funding formula used by the state is detrimental to rural school districts like Warren County School District.

We are suffering under the formula that is being imposed on us,” Stewart said.

And refusing to raise taxes would bring attention to that situation, he said. “We need better attention from the state on the plight that rural school districts are suffering… to put the pressure on the same people that rewarded the Erie School District for behavior that might have been… less responsible than our own over the years… and a terribly unfair formula.”

The majority of the committee was in favor of Grosch preparing a half-mill-increase budget for the board’s consideration.