The Princeton school board said this week that it would need to close a roughly $1.42 million budget gap between now and the time the fiscal 2015 school budget is finalized in April.
By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
The Princeton school board said this week that it would need to close a roughly $1.42 million budget gap between now and the time the fiscal 2015 school budget is finalized in April.
Board member Dan Haughton, chairman of the board’s Finance Committee, said Tuesday the gap was driven mainly by salaries going up by $1.8 million and employee benefits by around $900,000.
”So that’s kind of the bad news, but we’re dealing with it,” he said during the meeting.
Mr. Haughton, in an interview after the meeting, said officials would have budget workshops in which they would look at all the line items of the proposed budget.
”We look at what we can cut,” he said.
He said officials would look to spare staff and programs from the budget ax, yet he said this was an “extraordinary year” that officials have not had to face in a while. One option is to renegotiate its health benefits.
The school board is due to vote on a preliminary budget on March 13 and then submit it to the Mercer County superintendent of schools for review. The budget comes back to the school board for a final vote in late April.
”We’re going to get through this,” said school board President Timothy Quinn.
The salary increase, in part, is due to the “proposed” hiring of six new employees, while the bulk had to do with contractual raises, Mr. Haughton said.
The district expects to know next week how much state aid it will receive. Officials hope the amount is the same it received last year, $3.36 million.
”For the sake of our budget, we assume it’s going to stay flat,” said Superintendent of Schools Stephen Cochrane.
Given the 2 percent tax cap, the district is limited on how much it can raise in taxes.
”We don’t have a lot of flexibility on the revenue side, but we do on the expense side,” Mr. Haughton said. “But we’ll get through it and hopefully make the right decisions in terms of how to move forward.”
The district will take advantage of a waiver allowed in state law to raise the tax levy when there are sizable bumps in health benefits. Mr. Haughton said that would reduce by $300,000 what would have been an even larger budget deficit.