Sag Harbor School Spending Up 5%; Taxes To Climb 4%

The Sag Harbor School Board voted unanimously on Monday night to adopt a proposed $33.2 million operating budget for the 2011-12 school year and a 4-percent increase in the district’s overall tax levy to fund it.

The proposed budget, which will have to be ratified by Sag Harbor School District voters in a referendum on May 17, represents a 5.4-percent increase in spending over the district’s current 2010-11 budget, driven primarily by contractual salary and benefit increases for district faculty and staff.

The tax levy increase would mean some increases in taxes for district residents. According to a chart produced by Business Administrator Janet Verneuille, the owner of a house assessed at $500,000 on the Southampton Town side of the village would see his or her annual tax bill go up by $142 if the budget is approved as proposed. The same house on the East Hampton Town side of the village would see a $128 tax bill increase. For houses assessed at $1 million, those numbers would be doubled.

Compared to the nearly 12-percent hike in district taxes last year, which set off a tumultuous weeks-long debate over the possible need for layoffs and deep program cuts if the budget were to fail, this year’s modest spending increase has been met with little strife or concern from district parents. Unlike the 2010 meeting at which the district adopted its 2010-11 budget, which had to be held in the Pierson High School gymnasium to accommodate hundreds of teachers and residents, just a smattering of regular attendees of district meetings were in attendance on Monday.

Board members credited Ms. Verneuille, in her first full budget season since taking the reins of the district’s finances in early 2010, and Superintendent of Schools John Gratto, Ph.D., with much of the improvement in the finances. “I think you and John have both done a phenomenal job,” School Board President Walter Wilcoxen said to Ms. Verneuille on Monday.

The adopted budget carries in it some $546,000 in salary increases, $605,000 in additional costs for benefits, and $480,000 in capital work on the district’s two buildings. Board members said the work on the physical assets is dedicated to energy efficiency improvements, such as programmable thermostats and motion detecting lights, that would save the district some $33,000 a year in energy costs, and to critical health and safety repairs, such as replacing doors and renovating an electrical transformer closet.

The spending, along with several repair projects undertaken by the district’s own maintenance crews, rather than contract workers, would reduce the amount of a capital improvements bond the district expects to put up to voters in the fall by nearly $1.5 million. Voters rejected a $6.7 million capital projects bond in December 2009.