Barry Cain

Throughout this past school year, I communicated a number of times about the importance of the state biennial budget development process that was taking place throughout the winter and spring months. The budget has recently been finalized and does indeed have major impacts on schools both locally and across the state. In this article I will focus on one major change that has significant impacts on our local school district budget and property taxes. 

For quite some time, the Ellsworth Community School District has ranked as one of the lowest districts in the state when it comes to “revenue limit dollars per student.” Basically, this means we have less money per student to spend when compared to many districts. This has been a primary driver of our need to ask the public for additional funds through operational referenda. The new state budget does alleviate this issue somewhat by raising the floor for how many dollars we will have available to fund our local schools. This is good news for us and in the long run decreases the amount of funds we will need to seek through operational referenda. Still, we must keep in mind that our district will simply be at the minimum level available so this does not completely eliminate our need for future operational referenda. 

The new funds available do however come at a cost to the local taxpayer. This is due to the new state budget raising our local revenue limit authority (budget) while not adequately offsetting the state’s share of our local educational costs through state equalized aid. Due to this, it is currently projected that our local taxpayers will see an increase in property taxes by $45 per $100,000 in home value.

Obviously, a local tax increase of this type is never popular. As stated, in the long run, it will assist us in reducing the amount of money needed through operational referenda and it will allow the district to be more adequately funded to provide for a variety of needs. It also comes at a time in which the district has seen stable or declining levies and mill rates for the past six years. In fact, the 2022-2023 school year saw the lowest mill rate on record back to 1984 for our district’s residents and the projected tax levy for the 2023-2024 school year is still lower than the 2016-2017 school year following the approval of the construction of the Ellsworth Elementary School. 

As we enter into our next school year and our current investigation of a possible facility referendum in April 2024, I feel it is important for residents to have this information as an ingredient in any discussion regarding long-term needs. What I have outlined above is a direct result of the new state biennial budget on our local schools and demonstrates the importance of the state level political process when it comes to the impacts on our local school operations and our local communities.