2012-13 school budgetsSchool boards use reserves, staffing cuts to keep tax hikes in check
Posted: Monday, July 2, 2012 5:30 am | Updated: 6:51 am, Mon Jul 2, 2012.
Posted on July 2, 2012
Property taxes in the Bristol, Morrisville, Neshaminy and Pennsbury school districts will remain at their current levels in the coming school year, according to the 2012-13 budgets recently adopted by local school boards.
The other four Lower Bucks County districts will see average property tax increases ranging from $64 in Bensalem to $71 in the Bristol Township and Council Rock, according to the adopted budgets.
School districts will mail out the 2012-13 property tax bills in July.
The bills will include an exemption for eligible property owners from state gaming revenues. The exemptions range from $168 in Centennial to $281 in Council Rock.
For the most part, the exemptions are a bit less than the 2011-12 awards because more taxpayers are eligible this year to receive the credit on their tax bill, said Tim Eller, a spokesman for the state education department.
Districts shaped their budgets in part based on lingering concerns about the economy and the restraints put on the school systems by the state’s property tax relief law.
It allowed most local districts to raise taxes a maximum of 1.7 percent more than the 2011-12 tax rate.
If expenses were to exceed the allowable property tax increases, school boards would have had to seek exceptions from the state or get voter approval for a tax hike. Few chose to seek exceptions. None attempted to raise taxes by seeking voter approval.
Instead, the school boards depended on the use of reserve funds, staffing cuts or concessions achieved through new labor agreements to balance their respective budgets.
The staff reductions include 99 employees in the Bristol Township School District and several middle school educators in the Neshaminy school system, officials said.
Local business administrators caution that the financial situation remains tenuous.
“The outlook in the coming years is still bleak, looking at things like the retirement contracts,” said Christopher Berdnik, the chief financial officer in the Centennial School District.
5 comments:
From the table, Bristol Twp's mills are 192.27. Morrisville's are 177.3.
Why do people keep saying MV is the highest?
We have some fact challenged loud mouth liars in town?
We do have the highest millage, oh except for them, but hey, we have the highest millage. This argument never ceases to amaze me, highest millage or not, it means very little, as the value of a mill varies from place to place, and with the assessments dating to 1971, they are certainly no indicator of what a property's value is any longer.
The only meaningful way of looking at the school tax burden in a macro sense is to examine the average tax bill against the average income (or wealth - Something far harder to asses than income). Then you get a sense of the percentage of a family in that area's real burden.
But hey, don't let common sense ever get in the way of outrage!! That's not the Morrisvillian way.
We are the SOCS. We are here to assimilate your distinctiveness. No more independent thinking. Resistance is futile. Just cooperate.
This has been a public service announcement from the Bucks County Republican Committee
It's not working.
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