Newark Valley budget reveals 1.5 percent tax levy increase

On May 19, voters across the state will have the opportunity to approve proposed 2015-2016 school budgets and also to elect school board members. Newark Valley is no exception, as voters there will be considering a new budget in addition to three potential board members.

Fortunately for district taxpayers, the proposed budget comes in safely under the tax cap. Superintendent Ryan Dougherty said, “This year Newark Valley is going to have a budget-to-budget increase of 2.4 percent but that will result in a tax levy increase of 1.5 percent.”

Because the district’s tax cap allowed for a 1.92 percent levy increase, the district’s $24.7 million budget (up from $24.1 million in the current budget year) will meet the tax cap portion of the state’s tax freeze.

In order for property taxpayers to qualify for small tax rebates outlined in the tax freeze, this year the district also had to show savings through shared services and efficiencies. The savings must equal 1 percent of the tax levy and must be sustained for three budget years.

To meet that 1 percent savings requirement, Newark Valley teamed up with other districts in the Broome-Tioga BOCES. Dougherty said, “We had to submit an efficiency plan – [and] one of the options was to do it individually or collectively. We all did it collectively.”

Dougherty said that the savings came from streamlining office staff, participating in a cooperative food service, cooperative health insurance, and cooperative managed IT services. Districts were only allowed to count those efficiencies toward the 1 percent if they were implemented after 2011. Thus, the districts that were early adopters of shared services – such as Newark Valley – were effectively penalized. Fortunately, by showing the shared services savings collectively, the early adopter districts were after to benefit from the savings of districts that were later adopters.

One of the shared services savings that Newark Valley has done during the specified “look-back” period is the streamlining of office staff. However, Dougherty explained that this would not result in any layoffs in the coming budget year as those savings have already been realized from staff consolidations in previous years. In fact, he said, “This is the first year that the budget didn’t result in layoffs.”

This year’s budget represents some improvement over previous budgets. Dougherty said, “What we tried to do this year was … continue to expand our online course offerings which we did pretty aggressively last year and we’re going to further expand this year. There’s a lot of things we’ve kind of put off for several years – equipment for buildings and grounds has really been put off and put off and we wanted to restore some of that. We had an eye toward restoring some of our counseling services that we had lost in previous years due to budget cuts. We also took a pretty hard look at reducing our class sizes in kindergarten and first grade.”

This year’s budget also enjoys an increase in state aid, which is a result of a reduction in the Gap Elimination Adjustment (GEA). (The GEA is a repeated reduction in state aid to school districts that has been in effect since the 2009-2010 budget year, when the state enacted the measure in order to fill its budget shortfall.) Dougherty said that the district’s GEA deduction went down by roughly 65 percent in the 2015-2016 budget.

In terms of school board elections, there are three candidates – all incumbents – and three open positions. James Phillips, Ralph Parmalee, and Thomas Darpino are all up for reelection this year. All school board terms are three years.