Jacksonville School District’s budget from the previous year once again came up in the black.
The tradition of over-budgeting on expenses and under-budgeting on revenues. As a result, the 2022-23 budget finished approximately 7 million dollars ahead of last year’s final operating funds balance.
Superintendent Steve Ptacek says that built-up fund balance will provide a nice cushion if projections on state funding hold true on the rollback of Personal Property Replacement Taxes: “The CPPRT will be the big unknown for the second year in a row. Last year, it turned out that we got $6.3 million in CPPRT and it ended up that our revenue increased by about $6.9 million. I was telling the board the entire time last year that it’s probably going to increase about the level of CPPRT. This year, we are hearing early indicators that the state is going to cut into the CPPRT potentially to take some of that away to cover the lack of income tax revenue that the state is generating. That is scary. We’ve already worked on budgeting with a $4 million reduction in the CPPRT from $6.3 million down to $2.3 million. With that, if that were told that way, we could lose $1-$2 million next year.”
Ptacek says if projections aren’t so bleak, the final operating funds balance will still be a couple of million dollars in the black next year. Ptacek says if that happens, another project could possibly be on schedule on the horizon: “If CPPRT comes in at least at 80% of what we got last year, we still could be a couple million dollars in the black next year, which then we would start looking at another type of a $2-$3 million project that we could do, such as a renovation of the JHS auditorium. I’m not saying that will happen, but that’s the type of thing we would look at and talk about doing for next year as we would be discussing it this coming Spring.”
County Sales Tax Disbursement finished ahead of last year by about $290,000 allowing the district to continue to pay good sums on their bond payments. According to the numbers, the sales tax numbers are bucking a statewide trend predicted by the state.
The school district’s budget hearing are slated to begin for the 2023-24 year in late August and early September.