Pottsgrove Inches Toward Zero

The Pottsgrove School Board, which devoted its entire meeting Tuesday night to budget discussion, appeared to inch closer to not raising taxes in the coming school year.

After adopted a proposed final $64.3 million budget two weeks ago that would raises taxes by 2.4 percent, but which board member insisted "means nothing," they got down to brass tacks Tuesday.

The upshot of the meeting was that by guesstimating that:

A) the additional $800,000 or more the district would receive under Gov. Tom Wolf's proposed budget would, by a more conservative estimate, come closer to $200,000 by the time it exits the Republican-controlled General Assembly;

B) that taking another $200,000 from the nearly $400,000 the district received in delayed state reimbursement for the Ringing Rocks Elementary School construction project and,

C) Taking full advantage of the $400,000-plus in savings from  an unprecedented 11 teacher retirements and another savings of equal measure from a second good year in health care claims;

The board could whittle the 2.4 percent property tax hike down to .5 percent.

Board member Rick Rabintowitz led the charge for finding another $200,000 in line-by-line budget savings that could get the tax hike down to zero.

He also argued that there were enough major state initiatives in play -- property tax reform, pension reform, charter school funding reform -- that  a zero tax hike budget could be achieved without putting the district on a slippery slope of pilfering its reserve funds for short-term gain.

No vote was taken, but the path toward a lowered tax hike -- particularly given Business Manager David Nester's tentative endorsement of the path -- seems likely to veteran school board and budget observers.

Here are the Tweets from last night's meeting.

Pottstown Schools Budget Proposes Zero Tax Hike

Last year, the Pottstown school administration asked for a budget that raised property taxes by 2.9 percent with the caveat that the following year, they would produce a budget that didn't raise taxes at all.

Thursday night, they delivered.

During the meeting of the school board's finance committee, Business Manager Linda Adams unveiled the proposed $57,136,928 proposed budget for the 2015-2016 school year.

Despite a 2.16 percent increase in expenditures, the proposal does not raise taxes.

It relies to a large extent on Democratic Governor Tom Wolf's proposed budget, which would increase state revenues to the district by $1,343,212.

However, recognizing that Wolf's budget is unlikely to get through a Republican-controlled General Assembly unscathed, Adams said the district has a contingency plan to make up the roughly $800,000 in unrealized revenue it anticipates might be lost under a worse-case scenario state budget adoption.

Between the higher potential for property tax reform, the anticipated reported of a revised school funding formula, and Wolf's election largely on public school funding issues, Adams told the finance committee "I think we're pretty well set."

Here are the Tweets from the committee meeting: