Oconto Falls School Board sets tentative tax rate

OCONTO FALLS — The Oconto Falls School Board plans to complete work on its 2019-20 academic year budget at a brief meeting Oct. 30.

The board gave tentative approval to a tax rate of $10.52 per $1,000 of equalized valuation at its Oct. 14 meeting, pending the state Department of Public Instruction release of the amount of general state aid each school district will receive for the coming year.

Oconto Falls’ grant of $11.222 million, a 1.49% increase over 2018-19, was actually closer to what district accountant Kim Sinclair had projected in August than when she gave her semi-final report to the board on Oct. 14. Administrators had prepared their $22.7 million budget proposal based on an estimate that general state aid would be about $11.22 million, but they refined that estimate to a more conservative $11.204 million in October.

The tentative tax rate would support a property tax levy of $10.584 million, a 6.93% increase from a year ago.

The special meeting was necessary because the state figures are always released on Oct. 15 and the board meets the second Monday of each month, which this October was the 14th.

Sinclair and Superintendent Dean Hess said the biggest changes since August were a recommendation to pay down the district’s long-term debt by an additional $560,000 this year to keep the levy amount and tax rate steady after the $705,478 purchase of a little more than 100 acres along County Road I for future district use.

Robert W. Baird and Associates, the district’s longtime financial consultant, made the recommendation to pay the extra half-million in debt service.

“That’s interest that we won’t be paying for multiple years,” Hess said.

Since voters approved a referendum that authorized the district to increase the mill rate by as much as 23 cents a year, Hess said it has never quite hit that mark and have actually decreased.

“We had one year we went up 22 cents, then we had a year where we didn’t go up at all, and now you can see the mill rate is coming back down,” Hess said.

The district also benefited earlier this year with the closure of the city of Oconto Falls’ tax incremental financing district along Highland Drive, which increased the district’s tax base, he said.

Among other late changes to the budget were a $20,000 contribution toward improvements to the Memorial Park baseball diamond and $35,000 to extend a walking trail on school district property, part of a collaborative project with HSHS St. Clare Memorial Hospital.

Both projects come out of the district’s Community Service Fund, a fund specifically designated for efforts that benefit the community in general.