Tax rate to remain $10.74
By Bert Lehman
The Clintonville School District’s tax rate will remain at $10.74 per $1,000 of valuation.
The school board approved the the 2020-21 budget when it met on Oct. 26.
At the budget hearing held prior to the school board meeting, Lindsay Norder, the district’s business manager, presented two scenarios to the board.
Since the budget hearing and approval of the 2020-21 district budget was held prior to the $37 million school referendum on Nov. 3, the board needed to pass a tax rate for if the referendum was successful, as well as a tax rate for if the referendum failed.
Since the referendum was passed, the tax rate remained the same as last year’s rate at $10.74.
If the referendum would have been defeated, the tax rate would have been $10.13.
The district is allowed to pre-levy for the new debt the district will incur through the referendum.
This pre-levy will bring $417,000 into the Referendum Debt Service Fund. This amount equates to the difference between the two tax rates.
“We’re going to be allowed to go out and collect taxes on that first initial chunk, and that’s actually going to save the school district approximately $190,000 in interest over the 20-year referendum taxing cycle,” Superintendent David Dyb, told the Clintonville Tribune-Gazette.
Revenue
The district will see an increase in the amount of aid it receives from the state of Wisconsin. In addition, the district will receive a large sum of federal aid this year via the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.
Norder told the board one stream of revenue will decrease in the 2020-21 budget. A safety grant the district had been receiving from the state will come to an end at the end of 2020.
“We will not see as much money coming in for that,” Norder said.
Expenses
When looking at the district’s expenses, Norder said there is a very large decrease in salaries and benefits in the district.
“This shouldn’t be any shock to you guys,” Norder told the board. “Holly (Burr, the district’s former business manager) and David (Dyb) worked very hard on making sure that that would happen. That is our largest decrease in terms of spending.”
She said the budget also includes a cut to spending for technology.
“That hopefully will not be the same next year because we need to make sure that our technology keeps up to the rate of improvements in technology,” Norder said.
Summary
Norder said the district had a “huge” deficit, causing the Fund Balance to go down “drastically.”
“At the end of the year we still had our fund balance that was equal to about 21% of our total expenditures,” Norder said. “This year with cutting the budget by huge dollar amounts we are anticipating about the same percentage, but we’re still taking a hit to our fund balance, so we’re hoping that in the future we won’t have to do that.”
The district originally looked at a deficit of around $800,000, but was able to reduce the deficit to under $300,000.
“The administrative team really worked hard to get that number (down),” Dyb said “We knew we couldn’t tackle it all in one year, but going down as much as we did from last year to this year was quite significant on top of no pay raises and cutting back on a lot of areas.”