Few voters turned out to RSU 40’s budget meeting Tuesday, Aug. 11 at the Medomak Valley High School to approve a revised budget with an increased state subsidy that will be used to lower the local contributions of the towns in the district. The revised budget will now head to a referendum vote for final approval.
The Appropriations Committee in the Maine Legislature voted in June to add to the state subsidies that are given to local school districts for pre-kindergarten through 12th grade. RSU 40 received an additional $292,375.01 in subsidy, bringing the total state subsidy for the district up to $9,004,524.97.
The previous budget included a preliminary subsidy figure of $8,712,149.96. The school district could have placed the additional monies in a reserve account, or asked the towns for permission to spend it on something that was not budgeted for. However, RSU 40 elected to rebate the appropriation back to the sending towns.
This means that the towns will not have to raise as much as they were expecting to, and this will have an effect on each town’s budget or expected mil rate. Each town will now need to approve the revised school budget in a referendum vote with reduced local contribution figures.
In June, the towns of RSU 40, which includes Friendship, Union, Waldoboro, Warren, and Washington, approved a K-12 education budget of $24,032,456.26. Towns in the district were facing an increase between 5.8 percent and 8.24 percent in their local contribution from the previous fiscal year with Waldoboro facing the largest increase.
Waldoboro will now have to raise $4,813,554.82, an increase of $272,352.74 or 5.97 percent over last year’s appropriation.
Paula Sutton, of Warren, asked how the new figures were arrived at, and Business Manager Karla Miller told her the new subsidies were factored in by the Legislature during the budget process late in the spring. The new figures were not known by the time of the town meetings.
Andrew J. Cavanaugh, principal of Medomak Valley High School, praised the RSU 40 board for its actions. “The board felt it was the right thing to do to return the money to the towns,” he said. “Under the state’s direction, they could have kept the funds in reserve or asked the towns how to spend it, but they thought the honest thing to do would be to return it to the sending towns.”
