Reps from the Town of Rochester drew a bold bottom line on its assessment of the Old Rochester Regional School District’s operations and management budget of $17.5 million for fiscal year 2017, saying the Town cannot afford the school budget’s increase of almost 3 percent over last year.
During a February 29 ORR budget meeting that included selectmen, town administrators, and Finance Committee members from the three towns, Rochester Board of Selectmen Chairman Richard Nunes commented after a lengthy discussion that ORR is “not living within [its] means.”
“The three towns have to live within their budget. They have to balance their budget every year,” said Nunes, mentioning that ORR has more than once used funds from its Excess and Deficiency Account (rainy day savings) to offset the budget, which it can no longer afford do. “If you keep stacking the deck and you keep using high figures then this is where we are…. [The budget] just keeps growing and growing and growing and you’re not making the necessary cuts.”
Having been the first time the word ‘cut’ was mentioned, the discussion quickly escalated.
“Do you want a level-one school?” shot back ORR School Committee Chairman Paul Goulet. “You’re talking about kids! These aren’t wants,” Goulet said with the budget in his hand. “These are needs that have been pushed aside, pushed aside, pushed aside!”
Much of the school district’s budget increases stem from rising costs of insurance and retirement, as Mattapoisett Finance Committee Chairman Patricia Donoghue pointed out.
“It’s not like they’ve been adding things,” Donoghue said. “There are certain costs that have been really killing ORR that are beyond their control….”
Nunes said the Town of Rochester could only go as high as a 2.5 percent increase over FY16. Rochester faces an increase in last year’s assessment, with FY17 totaling $4,559,316. Marion is facing a total of $4,877,513, and Mattapoisett is looking at $3,946,403.
Nunes said Rochester only has about $400,000 to divvy up amongst its town departments and cannot afford the increase in the Rochester portion of the ORR budget.
“We can’t support the [$270,000],” said Rochester Finance Committee Chairman Kristian Stoltenberg. “Our revenue won’t cover it…. This truly is a difficult budget.” He later said that even if the budget went down to the 2.5 percent increase, Rochester’s ideal increase would be 2 percent.
Stoltenberg continued, “So it’s pretty drastic. We can sit here and talk about it … but that’s the reality.”
“We all have the same reality,” said Marion Finance Committee Chairman Alan Minard.
“And the reality is we have more students coming in,” said ORR and Rochester School Committee Chairman Tina Rood.
Stoltenberg said that all Rochester could do was hope voters would approve a Proposition 2½ override to offset the cost of implementing the ORR five-year strategic plan.
Superintendent Doug White listened to the discussion and chewed his pen. He said he was looking for direction, for someone to say where the three towns would go from there.
“I think we need to locally deliberate how we’re going to approach this and deliberate which road we’re going to take,” said Mattapoisett Town Administrator Michael Gagne.
Mattapoisett Selectman Paul Silva looked for a consensus amongst the three towns on whether they at least support the school district’s use of money it saved by refinancing on a loan to borrow on to fund the next five years of its capital needs, but there was no definitive response.
The three towns agreed to return to deliberate at the local level and inform White on their conclusions within 10 days, in time for a final budget presentation.
By Jean Perry