Columbia Falls seeks approval of school levies

Columbia Falls school district voters will be asked to approve $173,529 in special tax levies for the elementary and high school districts on May 8, but school officials want voters to know that their School District 6 taxes will not go up.   Reductions in the school district’s non-general-fund budgets will offset any increases that would result from the voted levies, school Superintendent Mike Nicosia said.  Reductions in the general fund are due to declining enrollment and minimal state funding. There also will be reductions in funding for school buses. Taxpayers won’t see all this accounting on their tax bill — they’ll see figures for the elementary and the high school districts that combine the voted levies with the other budget reductions. Taxpayers will, however, see a state-mandated explanation of the tax impact of the voted levy on their May 8 levy ballot. 

The 3.19-mill request for the elementary district would raise $91,544 per year. The tax increase for a home with a market value of $200,000 would be $9.40 per year. 

The 2.5-mill request for the high school district would raise $81,985 per year. The tax increase for a home with a market value of $200,000 would be $7.36 per year. Nicosia noted that money would be earmarked for textbooks, supplies, technology, equipment and other non personnel needs.  The district will not use all or part of the special levies if the school board learns in August that the levies actually raises taxes because of unforeseen circumstances. “The bottom line is that the voted levies will not increase district taxes under any circumstances,” Nicosia said. “That is the school board’s mandate.” Both tax requests would become permanent if approved by voters at least once in the next five years. Nicosia said that with declining enrollment and the impacts of three-year enrollment averaging, the school district’s base budget is shrinking every year.  Voted levies will enable the school district to handle additional cuts expected in the near future. The last time voters were asked to approve a levy was in 2008. “If we don’t do something now, while we still have voted levy capacity, the community may come back later and ask why we didn’t do what was necessary to save programs before we lost our capacity to vote levies in support of those program needs,” Nicosia told the board. The impact of school taxes actually has gone down in recent years, Nicosia said. “We cut personnel and/or programs in 15 of the 17 years I’ve been here,” he said. “Next year’s general fund budgets will be smaller than this year’s with or without a successful voted levy. This is the second consecutive year that’s happened with the elementary district and the third consecutive year with the high school district. Decreasing budgets while costs are increasing has become the norm.” Columbia Falls has been setting its permissive levy at about 89 percent of the maximum allowed based on enrollment. Nicosia noted that Whitefish High School, which levies close to 100 percent, budgeted about $1,240 more per student than Columbia Falls High School during the last school year. “If we did the same as Whitefish, we would have over a million dollars more at the high school level,” he said. “If they would have budgeted at our level, they would have lost about $725,000.” School District 6 will save about $73,000 in the elementary district and $84,000 in the high school district through changes in the school bus depreciation fund. Combined with a state grant, the net effect will be to rotate 1.75 buses in the next fiscal year instead of three. Buses are generally rotated every 10 years, and no bus will be more than 15 years old under this plan.