2007-10-30-AC-min - Laserfiche WebLink

Browse Search

October 30, 2007 Minutes Town of Lexington Appropriation Committee October 30, 2007 Place and time: Room 111, Town Office Building, 7:30 p.m. Members present: Alan Levine (Chair), Deborah Brown, John Bartenstein (Secretary), Rod Cole (Vice-Chair), Rick Eurich, Pam Hoffman, Mike Kennealy, Susan McLeish, Eric Michelson Also present: Tom Diaz (School Committee) The meeting was called to order at 7:40 PM. Special Education Budgeting Issues. Tom Diaz reported on the proposal of the School Committee that special education (SPED) out-of-district tuition and transportation costs be appropriated by Town Meeting in a line item that would be separate from the main public school line item. He distributed a handout that was based on a report from May 30, 2007 to Town Meeting that summarized SPED costs from FYs 2005 through 2008 and that showed that total SPED costs are not only going up, they are going up faster than the rest of the school budget, i.e., they increased from about 20% of the entire school budget in FY 2005 to nearly 25% (projected) in FY 2008. The handout also contained minutes from a meeting of the Lexington School Committee that was held in Burlington with other Lexington officials and committee members (including Deborah Brown of the Appropriation Committee) and with officials from the Town of Burlington. In FY 2004, Burlington separated SPED out-of-district tuition and transportation costs from their school budget and placed them in their municipal fixed expenses budget that is analogous to Lexington’s shared expenses part of the municipal budget. The purpose of the meeting was to hear about Burlington’s experiences with this budgeting practice. Tom said that the Burlington officials thought that the practice had reduced the contentiousness of supplemental appropriations for increases in the SPED out-of-district tuitions and transportation costs and had reduced the pressure to cut the regular education budget to fund unbudgeted out-of-district cost increases. Since the budgeting practice was adopted there, Burlington has indeed had to appropriate supplemental funds for their SPED out-of-district fixed-expense budget line. A partial copy of an agreement among Town of Burlington officials memorializing their new practice was distributed. Tom noted that Burlington, unlike Lexington, does not levy its property taxes at the Proposition 2½ limit. They, of course, prefer to minimize tax increases but have not needed to obtain approval in override referenda for required spending increases for, e.g., SPED. There was discussion about whether the absence of overrides played a role in limiting the contentiousness there of supplemental funds requests. - 1 -