Spending plans are in, but is everyone happy?
By Eric Valentine
School has started. Labor Day is over. And in addition to not wearing white for a while, those two things are reliable indicators a new fiscal year is about to get under way. During the summer, a great deal of work is done by staff and elected officials to craft a spending plan that satisfies organizational needs while not running that organization into “the red.”
What follows are overviews of the 2019-20 budgets for Blaine County School District and Blaine County.
The District
Blaine County School District gets to work early on its spending plans. In March it held public meetings asking stakeholders what their budget priorities were. After several committee meetings and board sessions, trustees approved the 2019-20 budget in June.
“The Board created budget guiding principles based on the strategic plan of the district and the information from the listening session and then directed administrators to create a budget based on the Board’s guiding principles,” district spokesperson Heather Crocker explained.
That resulted in a $98.3 million plan, up $10.6 million when compared to the 2018-19 budget. From 2016-17 to 2018-19, the district had never topped the $90 million mark, prompting some vocal parents and residents to scrutinize BCSD operations. Specifically, those stakeholders pointed to two spending issues:
Increased spending on administrative (non-teacher) salaries without—what they say should be—an equal return on investment in terms of student performance.
Spending on attorneys fees and legal settlements regarding, in one instance, a former employee who was paid $125,000 by the district to settle out of court.
On the matter of administrative salaries, the district has noted that it represents only 7 percent of district spending and that, overall, district students are generally outperforming their statewide counterparts. Meanwhile, a nearly $3 million levy that supplements spending on facility maintenance and upgrades ends this fiscal year. That means, at least in part, the district will have to convince the community its budget is both responsible and effective if it hopes to garner enough votes for a future levy.
The County
If you’re a deep-dive details person, visit the county’s website—specifically, www.co.blaine.id.us/DocumentCenter—and click on the Commissioners folder. Inside, you’ll find the most recent budget documents, a Russian doll of spending plans within spending plans covering everything from Blaine County Fair to Blaine County Sheriff’s Office expenditures.
If you’re more of a high-level 30,000-foot view kind of citizen, you should know that staff and commissioners have been working on balancing those numbers all summer. On Tuesday, commissioners unanimously approved the result of that labor, county staff confirmed.
Deliberation on a spending plan for fiscal year 2020 started in early summer with a shortfall of $5.6 million. The gap represented the difference between what county department heads say they need to operate and how much revenue the county expects to collect next year. That wish list’s deficit got reduced to $2.2 million soon after, once staff and commissioners separated—essentially—the “nice-to-have” items from the “must-have” items a little more.
Ultimately, further cuts and deeper digging into the county’s rainy day funds was needed to balance the roughly $31.5 million budget.