In a special Select Board meeting Thursday, members unanimously approved amendments to the Townâs FY2024 budget after Governor Maura Healey announced her budget recommendation including about $2.3 million more in state aid than Lexington had expected to receive.
Though the Select Board had approved a recommended FY24 Town budget two weeks ago, both school and municipal leaders struggled for months to balance their departmentsâ budgets while meeting community needs. Even with the opening night of Town Meeting less than three weeks away, local leaders agreed that in a year when the budget was so tight, the Town needed to immediately incorporate the unexpected aid into its FY24 budget despite the inconvenience of such a major last-minute change.
âGiven the challenges that we had this year, and the difficulty in balancing the budget, and the fact that both the school department and the municipal departments had to make some very difficult choices and not really fund what their budget asks for, we thought it was very important to go back and acknowledge this new revenue and revise the fiscal â24 proposed budgetâ to account for the new aid, Assistant Town Manager for Finance Carolyn Kosnoff said on Thursday.
Healey, who was elected governor in November, released her proposed state budget last week. Though Healeyâs budget is not final, and must still be deliberated by the Legislature, Town leaders noted that the Legislature has not historically decreased governorsâ recommended budgets. As a result, they felt comfortable making revisions to Lexingtonâs own budget based on Healeyâs recommended budget figures.
Most of Lexingtonâs unexpected state aid comes from a dramatic increase in Chapter 70 funding, which is earmarked to support public schools. Healeyâs proposal would fully fund the Student Opportunity Act, and her administration has said the proposed budget would constitute the largest percentage increase to this funding in more than two decades.
In a memo to the Town Manager, Superintendent Julie Hackett wrote that the MA Director of School Finance attributed Lexingtonâs Chapter 70 aid increase â from about $15 million to more than $17 million â to Lexingtonâs enrollment growth this year, after a few years of declines, and the Town having less funding for students in its recommended budget than the state formula called for after several years of exceeding its target contribution, among multiple other factors. While the Town had predicted an increase from FY23âs Chapter 70 aid of about $200,000, local Chapter 70 increased by about $2.5 million in total.
On Thursday, Kosnoff explained that Lexington has contributed the maximum amount to its âfoundation budgetâ school funding since 2018, receiving minimum state aid from Chapter 70 based on its resources compared to other communities. While last year, the state contributed $60 per student in Lexington, after contributing $30 per student for several years, this year the state aid amounts for $370 per student â âa pretty extraordinary amountâ that the Town could not have anticipated in its regular budgeting process, Kosnoff said.
Lexington is likely to continue receiving at least this amount in base funding going forward, Kosnoff added, as state aid rarely decreases from prior years.
During Tuesdayâs School Committee meeting, Chair Sara Cuthbertson said the increase was âfantastic news,â adding, âitâs nice to have some good news for once on the budget front.â
During a public comment period on Tuesday, Lexington Education Association President Avon Lewis praised other educators and the School Committee for advocating in support of the change.
âThis $2.5 million is the direct result of a coalition of thousands of ordinary citizens from across the state who made it possible for the Student Opportunity Act and the Fair Share Amendment to pass, including you, the School Committee, who passed resolutions of support,â Lewis said. âI’m also delighted to hear that the additional revenue Lexington is getting is going to be put into the operation of the schools and not into yet another rainy day fund.â
Though the unexpected state aid overwhelmingly consists of education funding, Lexington uses a budgeting process for all revenue, including state aid, that allocates approximately 74% of state aid to the school department and about 26% to the municipal department. Consequently, about $1.7 million of the unexpected aid will go to the school department, while about $600,000 will go to the municipal department. (A decrease in the Townâs expected fuel costs also gave the municipal side about $75,000 in additional revenue to work with, Kosnoff added.)
In the memo, Hackett wrote that the school department anticipated using the funding to hire additional staff as the district continues to negotiate a new contract with the LEA. Negotiations have been ongoing for the past year, and educators have publicly appealed for increased compensation, preserving weekly elementary half-days and more manageable workloads throughout the school districtâs budgeting and contract negotiation processes. Educators and union members, including Lewis, have also asked the Town to draw from its savings for capital projects to meet some of these needs.
Due to negotiations not yet being concluded, âit would be difficult for me to tell you how we intend to use these funds, but I can tell you that we are going to need additional Full Time Equivalents (FTE) to address current unmet needs in our schools,â Hackett wrote. If the school district increases staff positions, Town Meeting would need to approve budget adjustments in the fall to fund additional employee benefits.
The school department still plans to create an additional Special Education Reserve Fund proposed to support increased special education needs, as well as funding its existing Special Education Stabilization Fund, as previously reported.
On the municipal side, Kosnoff said that the Town would use its additional funding to pay for program improvements it could not previously fit into the budget, including a Human Resources assistant focused on managing benefits and Center Streetscape maintenance.
Kosnoff added that the Town had removed free cash, or unrestricted one-time revenue, from its operating budget, replacing it with some of the state aid. The Town previously planned to allocate about $400,000 in free cash toward bridging the municipal budget shortfall despite a long-term fiscal strategy of setting aside free cash into a savings account to help blunt the tax burden of paying for a new or renovated high school in a few years.
At the Select Boardâs meeting, multiple members said they wished Town finance staff had also used some of the state aid to replace American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding Select Board members had approved to fund a composting pilot program.
Town Manager Jim Malloy said Town staff did not explore this option because they treated the composting pilot as a one-time expense and focused on allocating the additional funding to ongoing operating expenses.
Select Board Chair Jill Hai, along with other board members, stressed that while the board only approved one-year pilot funding, they hope to incorporate funding to continue the pilot into future yearsâ budgets.
âI had hoped that maybe that [the composting pilot] was something that we could switch to funding with municipal budget, as opposed to ARPA, because that gives us the ground on which to build in a future budget,â Hai said. âI do hope that this is a successful pilot, and that we will be looking to see it in the budget the following year.â
Malloy said that he and the Department of Public Works director have discussed potentially funding composting in future budgets in part from any savings generated by reduced trash tipping fees over time.
Select Board members and finance staff said they plan to review the revenue allocation model used to divide revenue between school and municipal departments in the Townâs budgeting process within the next few months, ahead of the FY25 budget process.
âThose conversations need to start, like, now,â Select Board Member Suzie Barry said. âWe canât wait til summer; we canât wait til fall.â
Town Meeting Members can expect to receive an updated Brown Book, or budget book, today, Kosnoff said. Town Meeting begins March 20.
The enrollment increase is only part of the reason for Lexington getting additional dollars. The real story is more complex.
While Lexingtonâs enrollment did increase slightly this year, including in some categories of high needs students that we get extra funding to educate, the real driver of the increased funding came from a concept called the âWage Adjustment Factorâ. The wage adjustment factor (WAF) gives a district credit for having higher school costs if it is located in a geographic area where average wages are higher than in other areas of the state. It is more expensive for these districts to attract teachers and other staff because the cost of living is higher.
The wage factor is calculated using the latest available average wage data supplied by the stateâs Department of Employment. The factor reflects a townâs own average and average of the labor market area where the town is located. There are real differences in these averages, which represent the combined total for all industries both private and public.
Last year, Lexingtonâs Wage Adjustment Factor was one of the highest in the state. This is because the people of Lexington and the communities around Lexington, also experienced some of the highest income growths in the state far, exceeding the rate of inflation.
Meanwhile, there is another number called the Municipal Revenue Growth Factors. The Municipal Revenue Growth Factors determines revenue changes in select, recurring revenue streams. The property tax levy is assumed to increase over the prior yearâs levy by 2.5% plus an estimate of new growth based on an average of the last 3 years.
In recent years, Lexingtonâs home grown revenue growth has exceeded the wage growth in the area, resulting in Lexington getting the minimum changes in state aid. However, this year, the explosive income growth of Massachusetts highest earners during the pandemic has tipped the scales in the other direction and, in a remarkably perverse result, we are getting extra aid this year, because our residents earn so much.