While last-minute funding Shelton Aldermen approved for the city’s school district finalizing the municipal budget Thursday will be “helpful,” Superintendent Freeman Burr said staff layoffs might still be necessary.
Burr said he and other school officials would begin reviewing the 2013 – 2014 school budget situation Friday.
“We’ll do the best we can,” he said.
The Aldermen voted Thursday to approve a $115,828,907 municipal budget, and a tax rate of 22.31 mills.
Based on that tax rate, a house assessed at $230,000 will pay $5,131.30 in property taxes next year, or a $20.70 year-over-year reduction.
The new tax rate is about one tenth of a mill lower than the current year’s rate of 22.4 mills, or 0.4 percent lower.
Before the meeting started, Mayor Mark Lauretti entered the City Hall auditorium boasting loudly about the accomplishment, lowering taxes at a time when most other cities and towns were raising them.
Board of Aldermen President John Anglace praised Lauretti for lowering taxes while making improvements in sanitation collection, purchasing public safety equipment, progressing with road paving and keeping municipal debt at an acceptable level.
He also cited numerous school improvements outlined by top school administrators at a May 15 budget public hearing, without noting that the purpose of listing those improvements was to support a school budget increase that the Aldermen did not approve.
Anglace said Lauretti’s leadership as mayor for 22 years “has brought Shelton from the economic ruin of a mill town to one of the most desirable places to live and work in Connecticut.”
Lauretti added that stabilizing the mill rate creates incentives for businesses to grow in Shelton, and that produces jobs.
“The single most important thing today is for people to have jobs,” he said.
But the 2013 – 2014 budget picture looks less rosy for the public schools.
At the May 15 public hearing, Burr and other school officials said the Board of Education faced an $841,000 gap between the $65,400,000 recommended by Mayor Mark Lauretti and the amount needed to avoid layoffs and/or program cuts.
The Aldermen added $200,000, bringing the approved school budget to $65,600,000, and school officials late last week received word of $175,000 savings in next year’s employee health insurance costs.
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The Aldermen also agreed to pay for $100,000 in technology upgrades.
But Burr said that only closed $475,000 of the $841,000 gap, which could mean layoffs of tutors or other non-certified employees in the future.
