The Juneau School District could be in a $450,000 budget hole this fiscal year if the governor’s vetoes stick, but school officials are not worrying just yet.
“My initial thoughts were, let’s figure out exactly what the cuts are, what their impact is, when they’re likely to occur, and then sit down and strategize, but not do that before that,” Juneau Superintendent Mark Miller said told the Empire by phone Tuesday. “We have unfortunately spent hundreds of man hours game-planning for scenarios that never took place.”
Included in Gov. Bill Walker’s roughly $1.3 billion in budget vetoes announced last week were cuts to education funding. For Juneau, that amounts to about $3 million in school debt reimbursement, $250,000 in student transportation and $200,000 in school operation funding. The Legislature meets up again in another special session July 11 and its actions could impact the vetoes.
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The school debt reimbursement, which is the largest potential cut, does not directly affect the school district because it comes out of the City and Borough of Juneau budget.
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But, “the consequences of what they’re doing may affect us,” the district’s finance head David Means said Wednesday. “They can’t change, at this point in time, the appropriation for general school operations or activities or anything like that, but they might reduce the amount they set for us for capital improvements.”
CBJ finance director Bob Bartholomew said the governor’s vetoes were “much bigger numbers than we expected, so we’ll have to make adjustments.”
What those adjustments are remain unknown at this point.
“We don’t feel like we’re in a crisis but we know that we’re going to have to start adjusting sooner than we have thought we were,” Bartholomew said Tuesday by phone.
He said he’ll present a budget update to the Assembly Finance Committee during an Aug. 10 meeting, something that was planned anyway. At that point, Bartholomew said he’ll get direction from the Assembly on how to approach the potential budget gap.
“Your general options are to raise revenues, reduce expenditures or use savings. Those three options will be on the table, but we haven’t quantified anything beyond that,” he said.
The other $450,000 in student transportation and school operation funding that could get cut as a result of the governor’s vetoes would directly affect the school district’s Fiscal Year 17 budget.
For student transportation, Juneau gets a little more than $3 million from the state and about $50,000 from the city.
“We’ll probably have to take money from our operating fund budget to help subsidize the pupil transportation costs,” Means said. The same is true for the cut in school operation funding.
“We did budget for a little under $500,000 of fund balance carryover at the end of FY 17, so we do have a fund balance that is in theory large enough to sustain this $450,000 shortfall,” Means said.
At the end of FY 16, which just ended June 30, the district had about $2.3 million in carryover funding, Means said. That came from under-spending in previous fiscal years and a one-time $500,000 appropriation from the CBJ in 2015. About $1.8 million of that is being used to support programs in the FY 17 budget. That would leave about $500,000 in carryover funding for FY 17.
At this point in time, Means said the potential budget cuts will not affect any teaching positions or any other budget items.
“We’re not going to make any dramatic changes in the next couple of months to our budget,” he said. “Our budget is established.”
• Contact reporter Lisa Phu at 523-2246 or lisa.phu@juneauempire.com.
