School Board And City Council Close to Budget Agreement

After a nearly two-month battle between Meriden's Board of Education and City Council over how much money the city would allocate to the school district for the 2011-2012 fiscal year, the two entities are now only about $230,000 away from agreement – down from the $2.7 million gap they started with.

At its 6 p.m. meeting Tuesday night, the school board whittled its already-amended 1.7 percent requested increase in funding down to a 1.58 percent -- or about $1.58 million -- increase. A tentative plan by the city to allow the board to carry over its savings from the current fiscal year would drop that figure to about $730,000, city officials said.

At the same time, the City Council's Finance Committee met across the street at City Hall and voted to move up from the zero percent increase that City Manager Lawrence Kendzior had originally proposed on March 8 for the schools, to a $250,000 increase, by taking on another $250,000 in health expenses for the district.

Finance committee members also discussed a resolution to place another $250,000 in a fund designated solely for special education tuition for out of district placements – which the board can tap only if it goes over its budget in that area and exhausts all other manners of funding.

That would essentially leave a $230,000 gap between the Board of Education budget and the City Council allotment if the full City Council votes to approve both the budget and the resolution at its next meeting on Monday, May 2.

Schools Superintendent Mark Benigni said the remaining $230,000 would have to come from more savings this year or be cut from next year's budget. Benigni and members of the Board of Education came over to the finance committee meeting following their own meeting to watch the proceedings.

The budget that the Finance Committee voted to recommend Tuesday night also shifted an anticipated $300,000 in Board of Education unemployment payments back to the city's own coffers. The city has traditionally paid for BOE unemployment out of its own funds, but Kendzior's original March 8 budget had put that burden on the board.

City Councilor Walt Shamock, the only "no" vote for the budget on the committee, castigated the city's teachers for not offering to give up some of their contractual pay increases to fill the gap.

"It upsets me when other towns do this – like Cheshire – and we can’t get a dime out of our teachers," Shamock said.

This month, the Cheshire teachers' union agreed to take cuts in scheduled raises that amounted to a $1.39 million savings for the town's board of education. Instead of receiving an expected 4.6 percent raise this year, the Cheshire teachers agreed to take just a 2.3 percent increase -- the exact same rate of increase Meriden teachers already recieve.

"It's not apples to apples," said city councilor Trevor Thorpe, about Shamock's comparison. "They're in the same boat our teachers are in right now."

"They still gave back, and we have never given back," Shamock said.

Other councilors lauded the board for its work in chipping its budget request down.

"I’ d like to applaud the administration,"  Councilor John Thorp said. "It seems if they find an extra dollar they tell us about it and reduce their budget accordingly."

The City Council is expected to vote on the city's final budget next Monday.