Amagansett School District officials are anticipating some “big changes” in the 2024-25 school year budget, as they try to maintain a “fiscally responsible balanced budget” for the school’s Blue Ribbon academic programs, as well as a healthy and safe campus for students and staff.
As of the end of January, the district was looking at a 4.99-percent increase in overall spending from this year to next, according to a preliminary budget estimate presented during a Feb. 6 school board meeting. The current year’s budget is $13.17 million, while spending has the potential to rise to $13.82 million or more next year.
Amagansett, much like its neighbors, is facing rising costs for special education, health insurance and benefits for employees, and state-mandated increases to the retirement system. It is also facing a possible 17-percent decrease in state aid, amounting to about $75,000 less in revenue, which would have to be made up by a tax-levy increase, program cuts, or diverting monies from reserve or surplus accounts.
“We’re small enough to where that greatly has an effect,” Tom Mager, district treasurer, said by phone this week.
School aid totals have yet to be finalized in Albany, where both of the region’s state representatives, Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. and Senator Anthony Palumbo, have said they will not support a state budget with such dramatic cuts in school funding.
Two primary factors influence how much Amagansett could increase its tax levy without needing a 60-percent supermajority of voter approval to exceed that cap. The state comptroller has set the “allowable levy increase” at the maximum of 2 percent allowed by state law since 2012. Also, Amagansett’s “tax base growth factor,” which depends on elements like real estate development within individual district borders, has been set at 1.14 percent.
March 1 is the initial deadline for schools to declare to the State Education Department whether they plan to pierce the tax cap. Amagansett did so in the 2016-17 school year.
Mr. Mager said he sees challenges ahead. “We’re trying to obviously stay at the tax cap or below the cap,” he said, “but with inflation being the way it is and other obligations, there are a lot of unknowns right now. . . . This is going to be a tough budget year.”
The district’s next budget presentation will be on March 12, at 5 p.m. in the school library.