Katonah-Lewisboro voters to decide school budget, propositions on May 20

CROSS RIVER, N.Y. - A few questions will be asked of Katonah-Lewisboro School District residents going to the polls this month.

Top among them will be whether to approve a bit more spending—in this case, about $3 million more, to $127.4 million—to educate the district’s students. KLSD voters have been routinely doing something like that most every May in recent memory. 

They’ll also select three trustees for the seven-member school board, though with only three candidates running the outcome already appears to be in the books (story, page 4).

Finally, in a rare opportunity, residents will get a chance to generate money for the district, perhaps quite a lot of it, by greenlighting a solar-power initiative.

Voting will take place May 20 at the district’s three elementary schools—Katonah, Increase Miller and Meadow Pond—from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. The school board was scheduled to hold a public hearing on the budget at 7:30 tonight (May 8) in the John Jay High School library.

Recent hearings have been low-key affairs, with little or no public comment. It’s been 15 years since district residents turned down a budget for only the second time in this century. In both cases the budget was approved in a second vote.

At $127,410,469, next year’s proposed budget would hike spending for the 2025-26 academic year by $3,091,707. A property-tax levy of $109,490,423—that’s up by $3,483,316, the maximum increase permitted under state tax-cap limits—would principally fund the spending.

Four major outlays account for almost all the $3 million spending hike: benefits, including health insurance premiums and contributions to state retirement funds for staff and teachers, increased by about $1.4 million; salaries, by $1 million; cost to replace students’ personal computing gear, $324,622; and debt service, $284,349.

KLSD draws students from Lewisboro and parts of Bedford, North Salem and Pound Ridge. Different assessment practices create varying tax rates but essentially similar dollar impacts in the four towns. Increases next year are estimated as 0.27 percent in the Katonah section of Bedford, 4.26 percent in Lewisboro and 6.64 percent in Pound Ridge. North Salem would see a drop of 4.10 percent. 

Propositions

The budget, as always, is Proposition 1 on the ballot. But two others—a no-tax-impact money transfer and an opportunity to bring in “free money”—need voter attention.

The first of them, Prop 2, asks for approval to transfer $750,000—cash already on-hand—from the general fund to the capital fund to finance electrical infrastructure upgrades, including vehicle charging stations at the high school.

Prop 3 would qualify the district for additional state aid as it pursues a solar-power contract. A “yes” vote brings “free money,” says Superintendent Ray Blanch, in the form of a 10 percent bump in aid, ranging from $736,125 to $1.2 million a year for the life of the contract. The public’s permission is not required to pursue what’s called an “energy performance contract,” or EPC, says Lisa Herlihy, the district’s assistant superintendent for business. “The district will pursue a contract regardless of the vote results.”

KLSD negotiators will press for an EPC “that is budget-neutral,” Herlihy says. But “since the contract hasn’t been finalized yet,” she acknowledges, “we can’t unequivocally state whether there will be no tax impact. We will continue to work closely with our professional representatives to negotiate a contract that is budget-neutral.”