Sound Shore

With six candidates vying for two seats on the New Rochelle Board of Education and a city full of residents still riled from a contentious budget season, voters streamed to polling stations Tuesday.

District Spokesman Paul Costiglio said at 3 p.m. that turnout was 1,859—up 13 percent over the tally from the same time last year.

Poll workers at Ward Elementary School said many seniors and college students had shown up to cast their votes, indicating, they said, the width of the spectrum of residents who care about the school’s $230,872,398 spending plan.

Nancy and Sterling Jasper, having just voted at Ward, said they were glad to support the budget.

“We moved to this community for the diversity and the education,” Nancy Jasper said. She and her husband have two children in the school system. “We accept that we will have to support our schools,” given the limits of state and federal funding.

Many other voters voiced positions similar to Jasper’s.

At the High School, Steve Green said he’s lived in New Rochelle since the mid-1960s. He voted for the school budget, he said, because “I have seen nothing but progress and I hope it continues.”

After she voted in favor of the budget, Ellen Miller Arad said, “We just want to give our kids every opportunity we can.”

Others, though, said the school district has failed to curtail spending during a time of widespread economic hardship.

Martha McCann and her husband, whose three children attended New Rochelle schools, voted against the budget.

“They’re not being responsible enough with the money,” she said of district administrators. “They could more money out of that budget.”

In neighboring Pelham, where the fiercest budget battles were waged over proposed cuts to sports programs and nursing positions, turnout was low, according District Spokeswoman Angela Cox. Pelham voters have four candidates to choose for two seats on the Board of Education. They are voting on a $63,189,318 spending plan for the next school year.

At their 8:15 meeting tonight, Pelham Manor Village Board members are expected to adopt the proposed budget for the 2011-2012 fiscal year. According to Maryalice Barnnett, the deputy village clerk, the proposed budget will increase spending about $600,000 over the current budget to $13,032,494.

To help pay for that increase, the tax levy will climb to $10,907,212. That represents a 3.84 percent increase for private homeowners and a 10.21 percent increase for commercial property owners.

Barnnett said much of the increase is due to the rising retirement and health insurance costs. She said the village’s retirement expenses are set to go up 37 percent.

The New Rochelle School District Board of Education on Thursday unanimously adopted the proposed budget for the 2011-2012 school year.

The budget, which will go before voters on May 17, calls for $230,872,398 in spending, an increase of 2.66 percent over the current budget. School officials said the tax rate would increase by about 4.5 percent.

After weeks of, at times, contentious meetings at which members of the public pleaded for board members to spare programs, teachers and busing services, school officials adopted a spending plan that calls for fewer layoffs than had been predicted and partially restores busing for students attending out-of-district private schools.

A new collective bargaining agreement with FUSE, the district’s teacher’s union, saved the district $2.2 million. The agreement, slated for ratification on April 27, keeps teachers’ salaries flat for one year and then increases them 2.1 percent and 2.6 percent in the following years.

Look for a full story about the New Rochelle School District budget in Saturday’s Journal News.

The last public hearing on Pelham’s proposed budget is Tuesday evening at 7:30 p.m..

Pelham police PBA president Officer Danny Green said the  village plans to layoff a police officer, not fill two positions that have been budgeted for since 2009 but kept empty, and reduce the number of officers on the road at any given time.

 Green said the force has been approved min the past to be 25 officers plus the chief and a lieutenant. The force has been working with just 23 officers since 2009-two vacated positions were never filed- and now the proposed budget slates laying off an officer, eliminating a third position on the force.

By comparison, Rye Brook has 25 officers including sergeants, plus a chief and lieutenant. 

 The board plans to have only one officer on the road during the midnight tour and just two on the road at other times, he said.
There is also a proposal to reduce the number of crossing guards, Green said.
The overtime budget will go through the roof, Green and other officers said Thursday afternoon.
The officers were meeting Thursday and preparing to hand out flyers urging village residents to attend the last public hearing on the budget April 12 at 7:30 p.m.

The budget has to be adopted by April 26 for the next fiscal year.

Green said police have recommended that cheaper medical plans be offered or, with six officers on the force for the minimum of 20 years to get full pensions, the board should offer incentive packages for eligible officers to encourage them to retire.
Layoffs “should be their last resort, and instead it is their first,” Green said.

MAMARONECK — Residents may get sticker shock when they see the village portion of their tax bill June 1.

After raising taxes just 0.35 percent in the current fiscal year, the village has proposed a 2011-12 budget with a 5.95-percent tax rate increase, the highest in at least five years.

The proposed $29.9 million budget has a property tax rate of $300.11 per $1,000 of assessed value. A home assessed at the village average of $15,000 would pay $4,501.65, about a $252 increase from the current year. The average village home, this year, saw just a $15 increase from last year.

The biggest cost drivers in the proposed 2011-12 budget are steep rises in pension costs and tax-settlement refunds, Village Manager Richard Slingerland said. Meanwhile, the “big four” sources of non-property-tax revenue — mortgage taxes, sales tax, interest income and building permits — continue to decline.

Last year, the village was able to offset some of these losses by cutting several vacant positions and scaling back insurance and workers comp. “This year, there’s not that much flexibility, because we’ve already cut,” Slingerland said.

The proposed 2011-12 budget calls for cutting another three jobs from the municipal payroll. The village board will recommend where the cuts should land, but the hope is to do them through attrition, Slingerland said. The village would also use $510,000 from its fund balance, which now is about $4.1 million.

In addition, the village has looked at tapping new revenue sources next year, such as a possible hotel tax and recreation fees.

A budget hearing is set for March 28. The board is tentatively set to adopt the budget April 25. Both meetings are tentatively set for 7:30 p.m. at Village Hall.

The village had tax-rate increases of 3.98 percent in 2009-10, 4.35 percent in 2008-09, and 5.69 percent in 2007-08.

If the New Rochelle School District’s proposed budget were passed as is, 100 staff members would lose their jobs, out-of-district busing would be no more and taxes would still go up.

The proposed budget for the 2011/2012 school year, presented to the public this week, calls for $229,475,484 in spending, a 2.04 percent increase over the current spending plan. Meanwhile, the tax levy would climb 1.99 percent, with the tax rate rising 4.5 percent.

A budget overview session is set to take place tonight at 7 o’clock at the high school library. You can stream it live here.

In a memo to the Board of Education, Superintendent Richard Organisciak said, “As we enter the fourth year of what can only be described as an economic crisis, the [coming] school year threatens to present us with the worst financial condition that the New Rochelle School District has faced since the mid-1970s.”

The district is facing a loss of $4.3 million in state aid and rising pension and health care costs.

In an interview, Organisciak said the personnel cuts would come from across the staff, “literally from every title,” though specific positions have not yet been identified.

About 2,000 people work at the district full- and part-time. Last year the district shed 79 positions. Losing 100 more, Organisciak said, “could have very serious effects and impacts” on the schools.

“I can’t provide you with a positive spin on these cuts,” he said. “We’re starting to get closer and closer to what the community values.”

Organisciak shaved about $2 million off the budget by deciding to no longer bus students who live within the district to private and parochial schools outside the district. About 650 students rely on that service. Organisciak said he had thought the district was required to provide transportation to those students, but recently learned that city school districts are exempt. The Journal News called the state Department of Education but did not immediately receive clear verification of the superintendent’s position.

Organisciak said he expects significant opposition to the cut.

The district will hold a number of work sessions over the next month. The budget will be finalized by April 5.

Pelham School District Superintendent Dennis Lauro presented his budget for the 2011/2012 school year to the Board of Education Monday night. The important numbers: $63,378,800 in total spending, up 2.98 percent from the current year’s budget, and a 3.5 percent bump in the tax levy. To make ends meet Lauro proposed cutting 11 staff positions.

Like school districts across New York, Pelham is anticipating a reduction in the state aid it receives—about $750,000. Meantime, pension and health care costs are rising.

In a prepared statement, Lauro said, “I recognize that this draft budget will not satisfy all members of our community. Many will identify different allocations of expenditures that do not meet their expectations. Given the reductions in state aid along with proposals for tax levy caps in 2012/13 as well as our depressed economy, however, some choices had to be made and unfortunately, sometimes, based on doing ‘the least amount of damage.’ In the end, I believe that this budget will permit the district to grow where necessary and will address the needs of our more diverse student body while also controlling costs whenever possible.”

Board of Education members are scheduled to hold a workshop over the weekend to finalize the budget.

More than half of the respondents to an online survey by the school district here said maintaining small class sizes was their most important priority.

New Rochelle School District administrators had posted the six-question survey to the district’s website for a week last month. Their aim was to learn what parents, residents and taxpayers thought they, the administrators, ought to be focusing on as they crafted the budget for the 2011-2012 school year.

Of the 528 respondents, two-thirds said they are parents or guardians of school-age children.

Keeping class sizes from ballooning was the top concern, with 53.2 percent of the respondents selecting it.

After that, 44.4 percent said preserving Advanced Placement and other honors classes was most important. About one third of the respondents cited having the latest technology in classrooms as their top priority.

“I am not surprised to learn that class size is of critical importance to most people [who] responded to the survey,” Superintendent Richard Organisciak said. “That has historically been the case in this district.”

Also, 57.2 percent of the people who answered the survey said it was concern programs being added, reduced or eliminated that drove them to the polls to vote on the budget. A bit less than a quarter of the respondents said it was the prospect of their taxes increasing or decreasing that motivated them to vote.

This assessment of the community’s education priorities come as school officials face daunting challenges in crafting their budgets. As costs continue to rise, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has proposed cutting $1.5 billion in state aid to schools. New Rochelle stands to lose $4.3 million of the cuts are enacted.

Discussing the governor’s proposal recently, Organisciak said the loss of state aid, combined with other factors, could cost the district jobs.

“We’re going to lose good people,” he said.

MAMARONECK — Residents will see their tax bill go up 6.1 percent next year under a $30.5 million budget unanimously approved by the Town Board Wednesday night.

In the unincorporated part of town, the owner of an average home assessed at $20,000 will pay $5,648 next year — an increase of $328, or 6.1 percent, over the current year. And in Larchmont and Mamaroneck villages, where residents pay town property taxes on top of village taxes, the owner of an average home will pay $453 — an increase of $106, or 30 percent.

The 2011 budget, officials said, was developed with an eye toward continuing to provide the same services residents have come to expect, while imposing only a modest tax increase during tough economic times.

That’s been especially difficult this year, after several years of disappointing revenues, declining property assessments and increases in employee benefit costs that the town has little control over, such as pensions, workers comp and health insurance, officials said.

To control what costs it can, the town kept spending flat in the new budget and reduced operating and personnel costs, including laying off two employees, an office worker and a maintenance worker.

“This is a budget that invariably causes some pain,” said Town Administrator Stephen Altieri. “It is a budget, however, that is very responsible.

“Where the town could control costs we reduced them, where we couldn’t control costs, they went up.”

The town’s 2011 spending plan is an increase of $491,080, or 1.6 percent, over the the current year’s nearly $30 million budget. If benefit costs had not risen so much, next year’s budget would have stayed more or less flat.

The town initially proposed a 2011 budget of nearly $30.7 million in October that would have increased expenses by $671,000, or 2.2 percent. Under that plan, residents of the unincorporated area would have paid $371, or 6.9 percent, more than this year, and village residents would have paid $112, or 32 percent, more.

But over the past two months, town officials shaved out nearly $180,000 from the budget by deferring capital projects, reducing energy expenses at town hall and trimming its “pencil-and-pen” budget for equipment and day-to-day expenses. On top of that, the town is eliminating seven jobs from its 135-member payroll — two through layoffs, two by eliminating unfilled vacancies and three by offering early-retirement incentives.

The town had until Dec. 20 to adopt the new budget.

MAMARONECK — Village residents can expect the library portion of their tax bill to go up by about 3.2 percent next year under the $2.6 million library budget approved by voters Tuesday.

The Mamaroneck Public Library’s 2011-12 spending plan passed by a margin of roughly 75 percent, with 263 people voting in favor and 96 voting against it.

Voters on Tuesday also approved four incumbents running unopposed for library trustee positions —  Andrea Sambrook, Laurie Girsky, Clair Wolkoff and Steve Warner.

Under the approved budget, the average home assessed at about $16,000 would receive a roughly $500 library tax bill next year, about $15 more than the current year.

Of the $2.6 million in the spending plan, about $800,000 will be used for bond payments on the library’s renovation project, and the remaining $1.77 million will cover the library’s operating expenses.

Library officials said they put $435,000 from a reserve account into next year’s budget to reduce the burden on taxpayers.

“This a very fair and conservative increase in the operating budget,” said Director Susan Benton.

While renovations are in progress, the library is operating at an interim facility at 102 Mamaroneck Ave.

The renovations were was originally supposed to be done by the end of this year, but the date was pushed back to spring 2011 after weather-related delays and late supply deliveries slowed progress. Construction began in fall 2008.

CAPTION: A rendering of what the Mamaroneck Public Library’s renovated building, at 136 Prospect Ave., is expected to look like once the project is completed next spring.