By Brian Besch
Livingston ISD approved the proposed tax rate for 2024-25, a slight increase at 0.9212 from the year prior. Going back to a rate of 1.39 in 2018, the tax rate had dropped each year since. Last year’s tax rate proposed for 2022 was 0.9186, a difference of 0.0026.
The new rate does not maintain the same level of maintenance and operation revenue as 2023, which would have been 0.9547, or another 0.0335 added.
To finalize the 2024-25 budget, Chief Financial Officer Craig Davis led a workshop to open the meeting.
“The last two or three years, the state comes up with a compressed tax rate for every district,” Davis said. “They have been gradually lowering homeowner’s tax rates by forcing districts to compress their tax rate. What happens in that case is if you compress your tax rate, the state has to go up with what they provide to try to balance out income that you might lose on that compressed tax rate.”
Davis said the figures for 2024 are similar to those of 12 months ago. The school district was projected to have $43.6 million last year, whereas this year the expected number is $43.08 million. The financial officer told the board there was a large drop off in federal funds, where about $300,000 fewer than last year exist. “Our district receives funding from the Texas Department of Health and Human Services commission.” Davis said. “This past year, they have really cut back and cut down on what they are going to provide for those services. They have gotten real tight on what you can claim and they have also gone down on what they will cover.”
The ESSER funding that school districts welcomed for the past three years have also discontinued, resulting in another $1.5 million that Livingston will not receive. There was also a 3% raise in salaries for employees and personnel from the previous year.
“We are looking at our revenue being $900,000 or so less than what our expenditures project to be. It is pretty reasonable and we expected to be here,” Davis said. “We expect the next couple of years or so to be tight. The way the state is funding there is no new revenue, so we are having to manage our funding ourselves. We are just fortunate enough to have managed well enough for so long that we can do things like build out of fund balance.
There are a lot of places that can’t build out of the fund balance; they are having to pass a bond. We are in good shape still, and better shape than probably 90% of the districts across Texas, I would say.
Livingston ISD superintendent Dr. Brent Hawkins said district leaders knew when the ESSER funds were provided, that deficits would run on budgets for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years. “We have been very clear about that and I know sometimes people forget,” Hawkins said. “People in the community may not totally understand, but that was all by design. This year, 60% of the districts in the state of Texas are running a deficit budget. It is projected to be 80% or 90% next year. That just kind of gives you where we are in public school finance. Our deficit budget is kind of different. We do have about a $900,000 deficit budget. That was intentional. In January or February when we discussed staffing, we could have gone back on that and cut that stuff back to 2019 or 2020 numbers, but that would have taken away a lot of curriculum support. I don’t think that’s the right thing to do for students and I don’t think that’s the right thing to do for the goals we set.”
Hawkins said the school district is in good shape with departments like transportation, where they were able to plan ahead in purchasing buses. He said the school district will be able to survive the coming years based on good decisions years ago. LISD has actually been approved to purchase two vans, which have not been available for an extended period of time. They are needed currently for student transport in the CTE program. The flexibility that the school district has enjoyed in previous years for purchases may not be available in the coming years with constraints on the fund balance.
With the construction manager at-risk and architect not in attendance, a consideration to approve the guaranteed maximum price for the stadium project was tabled until Aug. 26.
Also tabled was a consideration of athletic department staffing, after hours of discussion in closed session.
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