TOWN OF PRINCETON, MA Princeton Advisory Board Meeting Minutes
10 April 2014
Rutland BOS invited five (5) towns BOS from the WRSD and their respective financial committees/advisory boards to a discussion WRSD FY15 Budget
AB members in attendance were: Wayne Adams, Dave Cruise,
BOS members in attendance were: Stan Moss, Neil Sulmasy, and John LeBeaux
Towns in attendance included Sterling, Holden, Rutland, Paxton, and Princeton
Rutland BOS Peter Lesky called meeting to order at 6.05PM.
Meeting was video-taped for later playback on local community cable network.
2015 WRSD Budget Discussion
State Rep Ann Gobi gave an overview of the House Budget for school district planning. Cautioned the budget may change after a Senate and a Governor vote.
- House budget to be ready 4/9
- Improvements included increases in transportation and special education funding
- Regional schools will be funded 64-68% for transportation
- No improvement for the Pothole Fund
Peter Lesky led a discussion on funding inequalities and issues, fund shortages and prop 2 1/2 overrides, town pressures both Rutland and Paxton face to make WRSD whole, and solicited additional ideas to reduce WRSD budget expenses.
Highlights of the discussion included:
- Paxton, Rutland, and Sterling will need prop 2 1/2 over-rides to meet their portion of the WRSD budget. Sterling will most likely pass an over-ride. Paxton and Rutland are less certain an over-ride will pass. A failed budget will most likely cause cuts in personnel.
- For future years, Rutland may consider pulling out of district for K-8. Very dissatisfied with WRSD personnel dismissals within Rutland schools with no transparency and stated reasons.
- WRSD trend is a flattening student population, with flattening state aid, while WRSD expenses go up. Towns will be challenged each year to find funds to meet the increased expenses w/o cutting into critical town services such as police, fire, and roads.
- Historical WRSD strategy to get a balanced budget with the towns is to get 3 towns to accept the budget and apply pressure to the remaining 2 towns to fund the budget. In recent years, this has been Paxton and Rutland, forcing a 2 town partnership. To be effective, all 5 towns should be forming a common strategy with the WRSD budget.
- Confidence in the WRSD budget and fund management is not as high as it could/should be. The pension funding errors and capital improvement requests without quotes might be areas where excess estimates still exist and could yield budget cuts. WRSD refusal to support open audited books and more transparency in operation will continue to keep confidence sub-par.
- Towns may be able to collaborate on common capital improvements with shared cost savings.
- Research should be taken up to review all state Regional School Districts to further understand if WRSD is unique in its issues or share common funding problems the state needs to better address.
- Recommendation for a taskforce be setup that is represented by 1 town BOS and 1 town school committee representative to improve town and WRSD communications, needs and constraints, and formulate a 5 town strategy.
Reference documents handed out by BOS to AB members:
- Town of Rutland meeting invitation to Princeton BOS
- 2/24 WRSD Preliminary FY15 Budget PowerPoint presentation
- 3/13 WRSD Letter to towns stating House and Senate to use Governors MLC numbers (reflecting no change in planned chapter 70 funding)
- 3/18 WRSD Letter to Town of Princeton for the E&D numbers to be used as local revenue in FY15 Budget
Respectfully submitted,
Wayne M. Adams, AB Member
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