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Sweet Home administrators outline 2025–26 budget plan, urge use of tax-cap carryover and warn of rising transportation and special-education costs
Summary
District finance officials presented a program-maintenance draft budget for 2025–26, recommending use of available tax-cap carryover and warning that transportation (including contracted runs and electrification), out-of-district special-education tuition, and health-insurance costs are the largest upward pressures.
Sweet Home Central School District administrators on Saturday presented a program-maintenance draft of the 2025–26 budget, projecting $104.87 million in revenue and recommending the board consider using available tax-cap carryover funds to reduce the need for deeper cuts.
The presentation focused on four revenue drivers — state aid, property taxes and the tax cap, county sales tax, and use of reserves — and on several major expense pressures: contracted transportation and driver shortages, rising out-of-district special-education tuitions, collective-bargaining step/contracted increases and benefits, and uncertainty about federal funding for electric bus purchases and charging infrastructure.
Why it matters: The board must adopt a proposed budget in April and the budget vote and school board election are scheduled for May. Administrators said decisions this spring about whether to use carryover tax-cap authority and how to allocate reserves will materially affect whether the district can preserve programs without larger tax increases.
Assistant Superintendent for Finance and Plant Operations Michael Feldman led the budget review and gave the board an initial revenue and expense picture. He said the governor’s executive budget run raised the district’s basic foundation aid by about $2.72 million and raised total executive-run state aid by roughly $3.55 million compared with the current year’s budget figures.
Feldman told the board the district’s projected revenue for 2025–26 is $104,865,123, about $4.45 million (4.4%) above the current year. Present draft expenditures total $104,729,512 (up 4.3%), leaving a small projected surplus of roughly $135,000 in the preliminary plan.
Tax cap and carryover: Feldman walked the board through the state tax-levy limit calculation and a district-specific tax-base growth factor set by the New York State Office of the State Comptroller. For Sweet Home that factor is 1.0 for 2025–26, which reduced the automatic growth…
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