Public Budget Hearing
Last night, Wednesday January 13, 2021, was the Public Hearing on the Oyster River School District FY 2022 budget. Two brave members of the public showed up at the high school auditorium. I watched on YouTube. Click here for the superintendent's slide presentation.
The budget topped fifty million dollars for the first time. The main news is the Local Education tax line is forecasted to go up 10.5% in Lee, 9% in Madbury, and 2% in Durham. As I said the last few times, it's not the school board's fault, which admirably kept their increase to under 3% while financing a new $50M middle school.
The Local Ed tax is about 55% of your total property tax bill in Durham, 62% in Madbury and 65% in Lee.
School board watchers have known since early December about the big projected rises in the Lee and Madbury local education tax line. The superintendent presented this slide tonight:
I feel a twinge of guilt when I see this awful slide every year. Five or seven years ago I suggested using "tax impact" as the figure of merit, and the board more or less adopted that. I meant a single number, the change in expenses less revenue including all recommended warrant articles, but not counting state adequacy aid. The idea was to boil down the responsibility of the school board to a single number. This is pretty much how the board states its annual budget goal, which is a great improvement over the old way.
But here what they're trying to do is, at least a first glance, is predict the change in the millage on the Local Education tax line on your tax bill. They're not really doing this, as the asterisk indicates (and again is missing from Durham, which I've been assured in past years is a typo). These millage predictions are a proxy for the change in the total amount asked of the taxpayers of each town. The district doesn't yet know how assessments will change, so they can't really predict the millage. If Durham has increased its tax base, that total will be divided among more property there and make the millage increase less than indicated here.
It would be helpful to have percentage increase or just the current values of the millages for each town so the viewer can calculate percentages. Unfortunately that's generally omitted, as it's usually bad news the district doesn't want to put in your face. I'll calculate them below.
These millage numbers include the adequacy amounts that the state says it will grant each town, which is the main reason why the changes are so different across towns. (Another reason has to do with equalized valuation.) There's a formula for adequacy aid, but the state plays around with the total amount of money available some years. Last year the state was very generous; that's dried up this year. Lee and Madbury get much more state aid than Durham, so benefited more from the increased aid last year, and get hurt more now that the party has ended.
All the board can really control, what is captured as "tax impact", is the total budgeted expenses less the total forecasted revenue. That is the total amount of tax dollars that need to be apportioned between the towns. It gets pegged to actual spending and revenue through the fund balance, the difference between the budgeted and actual amounts at year end, (some of) which gets counted as revenue for the next year.
Once the school budget is determined, there's a complicated process of apportionment that goes into determining the Local Ed millage on everyone's tax bill. First each town gets a bill for their share of school budget. Half the budget is divided proportional to the number of students in the town, the other half proportional to the total equalized property value of the town. Then the state sends adequacy aid to each town; that's where the major differences arose this year. What's left over is billed to the property owners in each town, in proportion to their individual assessments.
The net result is pretty close to what would happen if the district was just one big town, where the property owners proportionally split what's left of the bill after the state contributes. But the apportionment formula, varying state aid, and the valuation equalization (which I haven't talked about) pretty much randomly churn up the numbers, each year making a winner town and a loser town and generally increasing annoyance at the district and the need to finance schools.
Tax Rate History
Here's another flawed but informative chart from the hearing. The superintendent calls these the projected tax rates, but that's a bit misleading. These millages per se are never presented at the budget hearing or deliberative session, just their forecasted increases, as I mentioned.
The superintendent's goal was to show that over the years their scary predictions at the budget hearings have been mostly overestimates, which seems true. We can't tell for sure by just looking at the actual millages, because we can't tell how much of the change is due to what's happening with assessments.
Ignoring that (because I'm too lazy to look up and interpret valuations right now), the history is fascinating. Over the eight year span, if you can believe the millages, the average household's school tax in Durham's went down 6%, Madbury's down 2% and Lee up 9%. That's perhaps a bit misleading for Madbury, which benefited from the extra aid last year that won't reappear.
It seems too good to be true. I can imagine Durham adding real estate at a rate that actually lowers the average tax rate, but I don't think Madbury has. (Adding real estate doesn't really work as well as one might think to lower a town's taxes, because that increases the town's value and generally its student count, so its share of the school bill goes up, though with a lag of a year or two. Commercial real estate adds to the valuation but not the students, so is effective at lowering taxes, though at half strength since it also raises half the apportionment.) If it is true, it's definitely a story the board should be telling -- mostly lowering taxes as costs inexorably rise. I'll have to come back to this.
Let me try a spreadsheet.
Let's talk about equalized valuation. The State Ed tax line is a good example. In any given year, the State Ed rate is the same for every (non-exempt) property owner in the state. The reason the millages are different is they're calculated on actual assessments, which are different than the equalized valuations that determine what's the "same" across towns.
The state recognizes assessed values aren't the same as actual values, so attempts to equalize the valuations so they're comparable across towns. The way they do this is every year, for each town, they compute the ratio of the total assessments of all the sold properties to their total sale price. Glossing over some details, that ratio is called the Equalization Ratio. The total assessed value of each town is divided by its Equalization Ratio to get the equalized value of each town.
It's the equalized value that determines the proportion of the total State Ed paid by the property owners in the town. But the actual millage is determined by the dividing by the unequalized assessed values. So the millages of each town are different, even though each property owner in the state pays the same percentage of the equalized value of their house.
Equalized valuation is a fair if sometimes noisy way for determining the State Ed line. What it means for Local Ed is that a few home sales in Lee at higher than expected prices end up raising the imputed value of the town, and thus raising everyone's school tax in Lee through the apportionment formula. While this probably all evens out in the long run, it is irksome each year as one town feels slighted.
Middle School Progresses
Let's show some more charts the Superintendent shared. He presented these first, saving the bad news I lead with for the end.
The middle school is progressing nicely. We're on schedule for the students to move in March 2022, only fourteen months away!
The bond financing finally closed in August. The rate was incredible, coming in at 1.97%, which will save lots of money compared to projections of 3.5% or more. I think this is only for around half of the school; there's another bond to close this year. With that rate they may regret not having financed the entire thing at once; we'll see where the next bond comes in.
At the public hearing yesterday, there was a fair amount of bragging about the district's SAT scores, special ed program and college placement rates that I won't repeat here; check out the slides or watch the video (should appear there soon) for all that.
Major Drivers of the Increase
The superintendent presented this chart indicating in which lines expenses have risen most.
The district kept things pretty lean in this difficult budget year. We got lucky on the bond rate, the silver lining of the pandemic crashing the economy, which helped. There's around $500,000 in bond interest I think (2% of $25M) that didn't make this chart; not sure why.
