The Derby school board president said Thursday he’s willing to sit down with city officials and talk about hiring a joint finance director to oversee both the school and city annual budgets.
“I’m not speaking for the entire school board, but personally, I’m for it if it saves people money,” Ken Marcucio, Sr. said.
“But the school board can’t lose its autonomy. We still need to have authority over the money they give us and we need to be able to do things like make money transfers in our budget,” he said.
In Derby, the school and the city create separate budget plans every year. The city’s Board of Apportionment and Taxation (the tax board) then decides how much money to allocate to the city and the school district.
An important point — the tax board only approves an annual lump sump for Derby Public Schools. The school board and district administrators decide precisely how the money is spent, not Derby City Hall.
The city employs a part-time finance director, while the school district employs a full-time business manager.
However, at the moment, the City of Derby is currently lacking a finance director, after the controversial departure of Henry Domurad, Jr. in April.
Meanwhile, Derby Public Schools have been using an interim business manager since Pamela Mangini left for another school district in October 2011.
The City of Derby formed a search committee to find a replacement for Domurad. The search committee has been conducting interviews with possible replacements over the last few weeks.
The search committee is close to recommending a few candidates to Mayor Anthony Staffieri.
However, the bi-partisan panel first wants to see if the school board is willing to merge the positions into one.
The search committee sent a letter dated July 25 to Marcucio but hadn’t heard back as of Thursday morning, according to Ken Hughes, an Alderman who also serves on the search committee.
“As far as I know there has not been a response either way,” Hughes said. “We owe it to the taxpayers of the city to at least look again at a joint finance director. It makes sense and this is the perfect time.”
Hughes estimated hiring one person instead of two people could save taxpayers some $80,000 on salaries and benefits by hiring one person instead of two.
Marcucio said he received the search committee’s letter at the beginning of this week. He shared it with his fellow school board members this week.
“They (the search committee) wanted to meet. I have no problem with that,” Marcucio said.
Ron Sill, the president of the Board of Aldermen and the chairman of the search committee, also wants to hire a joint finance director.
He said he hoped at least two other members of the school board would sit down and talk about the new position as well.
“At least the door is open. We’ll take it from there,” Sill said.
Does all this sound familiar, Derby residents?
That’s because the Aldermen, back in 2007, formed a committee to research this very subject. That committee included two school board members.
The Electronic Valley, Derby government’s unofficial website, has links the committee’s old work, which included contacting a few towns in Connecticut that use joint finance directors.
In April 2007, the Aldermen voted to create the position — but the position was never actually created and the school and city continued to have separate finance directors.
Marcucio was not a member of the school board in 2007. He said the chief stumbling block to the creating a joint position is the school board losing control of how it spends its money.
“We want to know what the ramifications are. If we combine, we want to know exactly how it will affect us. So this will be a first step. George (Tanner, the school district’s interim superintendent) will schedule a meeting and we’ll see where we go from there,” Marcucio said.
The Valley Indy left messages Thursday with Mayor Anthony Staffieri and school board member Kimberly Kreiger.
The letter to Marcucio is posted below:
