Schools

Chappaqua School Board Votes To Use Reserve Funds To Bring Down Tax Increase, Budget Cost

Change of funds will be lower projected tax rate, lower budget-to-budget percentage increase.

The Chappaqua Central School District Board of Education voted 5-0 at last week's meeting to appropriate money from reserve funds to bring down the cost of its budget for the 2010-11 school year, according to information sent by Jeffrey Mester, president of the board, in an email.

Mester said that the option for doing so was presented at the meeting by Superintendent David Fleishman and Assistant Superintendent for Business John Chow. Under the proposal, about $588,000 in reserve funds will be used to hold down the budget's cost. Mester said that $365,113 of this money will come from the anticipated year-end fund balance and will go to keeping down the cost of the Employee Retirement System. The remaining money is in the amount of about $233,300, Mester said, and will come from "excess funds" that were intended for capital projects. Instead that money will be used to directly reduce the tax levy, Mester said.

The change in financing will result in both a lower tax increase and a lower budget-to-budget percentage increase. Mester said that the new projected tax rate will be 2.32 percent, and is down from the previous amount of 2.93 percent. The budget-to-budget percentage will only be at 1.9 percent, down from 2.24 percent when the budget was first proposed a month ago. Use of $1 million in reserve funds was proposed in the initial budget, but the reserve money approved last week is an additional amount.

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To view a full, archived broadcast of the March 23 school board meeting, head over to ncctv.org.


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