School district, assembly reach budget compromise

PALMER — The borough assembly and school board reached a compromise Tuesday on an ordinance changing school district budget reporting formats.

And while that description of the ordinance may sound banal, it raised eyebrows at the school board, especially those of school board president Colleen Vague.

Vague said the apparent intent of the ordinance was to track how money the state provides on a per-student basis flows to schools. Which would be fine, she said at school board meetings two weeks ago, if it stopped there.

But her worry, she said, was that the next move would be to force the district to make that money follow the student to his or her school. Such a move would take a significant bite out of funding for schools with low enrollment numbers, possibly causing some of them to close.

But Jim Colver, the assemblyman who proposed the changes to the budget reporting process, said that was never his intent.

His intent, he said, was to provide the assembly with better information, both for planning future budgets and for lobbying the state for more money. The five-year financial planning portion was actually the first part of the ordinance he drafted.

He pointed to projections that the school district will need a new high school in the Knik-Fairview area. He said he wanted to be certain that the school was necessary and that the borough had money put aside for it.

“My concern is we don’t haphazardly build a new school because we think we need one,” Colver said, “so it doesn’t just show up and we have this $5, $10 million budget hit we don’t know what to do with so we end up cutting all the other schools.”

Schools Superintendent George Troxel, at the school board’s meeting Wednesday, said a raft of compromises he took to the borough assembly ironed out a lot of the rough spots in the ordinance.

For instance, Colver had asked for a break down of how much money is spent at each school. But the district, Troxel said, in a lot of instances doesn’t budget that way.

Some programs — building maintenance, for example — are budgeted on a district-wide, rather than a per-school basis. Ferreting out that information would have been costly and time-consuming. One of the compromises, he said, took care of that.

“They’re just interested in seeing those school site budgets by line items, not how district services are provided by site,” Troxel said.

One of the bigger points of contention on the budget reporting process was Colver’s request that the district show the assembly how much money goes toward “unfunded mandates.” Unfunded mandates are, generally, services that the state or federal government requires the borough to provide but which the state or federal government does not adequately fund, leaving the borough to pay the cost of the programs.

George Troxel, the district’s superintendent, said that to track all that money down would require enough extra work that the district would need to hire extra people.

He said, he could provide round numbers to the assembly for what those programs cost, and couple that with numbers for what the state provides.

That, he said, would take away most of the extra work, thus driving down the cost of the new reporting scheme.

Colver said he was fine with that.

“I never intended to chase down every nickel,” he said.

But having a good estimate of what those costs are, he said, is important.

“We can go to the lawmakers who are making these decisions and say, ‘look, here’s what the problem is.’”

Eventually, the ordinance, with the district’s raft of amendments, passed the assembly without objection.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.