By Sarah Hall
Editor
The Baldwinsville school board has submitted a Corrective Action Plan (CAP) to the New York State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli’s office in response to an audit claiming the district’s budgets were neither “reasonable” nor “effective.”
The audit, submitted to the district this past June, accused the district of inappropriately allowing its unrestricted fund balance to grow beyond state limits instead of using the money to cut taxes.
The audit, which covered the period from July 1, 2014, to Oct. 31, 2015, said the BCSD Board of Education’s failure to adequately predict the district’s needs led to overages in the last several budget cycles.
“From fiscal years 2011-12 through 2014-15, the district improperly calculated its unrestricted fund balance and spent nearly $23.8 million (93 percent) less of appropriated fund balance and reserves than were budgeted to finance operations,” the report states. “As a result, the district’s recalculated year-end unrestricted fund balance averaged about 9.4 percent of the next year’s budgetary appropriations over the last four years, which is more than two times the statutory limit [which is 4 percent].”
But the CAP, written by Acting Superintendent Matthew McDonald and BOE President Victor Jenkins and presented at the Sept. 12 Baldwinsville Central School District Board of Education meeting, says there is “room for reasonable disagreement” about the district’s financial practices.
“The amount of the district’s unrestricted fund balance is in compliance with real property tax law statutory limit,” the CAP reads. “Historically, the district has also budgeted an amount of designated fund balance each year to lower the tax levy.”
Meanwhile, the amount of money taken away by the state’s Gap Elimination Adjustment did add up — between 2009 and 2015, when the GEA was finally eliminated, the BCSD lost $29 million in state aid, which McDonald and Jenkins wrote “could have been used to lower the tax levy.”
The CAP also objected to the audit report’s assertion that the district’s budgets have been unreasonable.
“It is our position that the district has always prepared budgets that do not raise property taxes more than necessary,” the Cap reads. “[There is a] difference of opinion between the comptroller’s office and the Baldwinsville CSD’s Board of Education… We maintained instructional programs in the face of economic difficulty and kept taxes reasonable — a 1.75 percent average increase over seven years.”
McDonald and Jenkins were thus disinclined to accept the comptroller’s recommendation to spend down the district’s reserves.
“The decision to establish and fund these reserves remain a local board of education decision,” they wrote. “Going forward, the district will analyze annually the risks inherent in using reserves… to pay annual operating expenses. The district is reluctant to purposefully create annual operating deficits.”
They did agree to annually review the fund balance and to create a multi-year financial plan going forward, which will be in place by the end of the 2016-17 fiscal year.
The full audit report can be viewed at osc.state.ny.us/localgov.audits/schools/2016/baldwinsville.pdf. To see the district’s CAP, visit bit.ly/2cckOS5.
