thanks for joining us today this is talking politics in western pennsylvania today's guest is lisa anderson a fellow board member here peter sonship this is probably one of the most important shows that we've ever done because not only you know when we talk  about and most of the other programs we're talking about abstracts this program is of not only going to affect our taxpayers but it's going to affect the history or the future should i say of our school district and so lisa  let's get started because we have an hour long program and we have so much information to give out that it's going to be hard to put it into that period of time so while it's let's start our program today is  senate bill seventy six and the original idea of that is to give all the taxpayers back the homeowner taxpayers back their real estate taxes for their schools now that sounds great that sounds wonderful ok but the ramifications of that i believe have not really been thought through and i said this program we're going to be talking about that lisa was kind enough to put together a presentation for us today and we're going to be going through those slides and we're going to ask her to to go ahead and discuss that let's start first by telling letting the people know what exactly they paid and why they paid to the school district and things like that ok so you were local and federal funding federal funding for our district in particular is very minuscule by sixty million dollars budget it's about three hundred thousand dollars so we're not talking about that portion and then the state gives us another portion that's made up of this year three different things state basic education funding state special education funding and then sometimes they throw in a little grant  se special education funding is about a million and a half that we get the basic education funding is about five million and that takes into a lot of different kind of factors in addition to your wealth and  then there's the local portion the local portion for our district is mostly made up of real estate taxes which is about thirty six point five million dollars in revenue last year as well as the earned income tax so everybody pays a one percent personal income tax half of that goes to the township half of that goes to the district and that's about five point six million so the largest portion of our sixteen million dollars budget does come from real estate taxes and this legislation is specifically meant to deal with just that small local portion that real estate tax portion and changed at from a local source of revenue to a state well let's point that out with that we're talking about about seventy percent comes from our local taxpayers yes seventy five percent of our district is funded by local residents so when we're talking about that though we also have to look at the idea that approximately seventy percent of our tax payers are homeowners don't have kids in the district that's home so when we're looking at those figures it is a disproportionate amount and one of the things why seventy five percent is because the states looks at your district's ability to pay more taxes that's correct so that what what we're i mean we're we're behind the power curve in every aspect here because not only have we been able to do that we've been able to do that well but the state looks at that and says we don't need as much money from us because your tax payers can't afford it yet so that's something that's not taking into account with the senate the also is that basic education funding portion looks at gives us less to its tune between one thousand dollars a student in washington county to compared to other districts sometimes seven thousand dollars less per student in some districts in washington county because they work at us and say your you have the ability to generate that money from real estate taxes where other districts don't so you're going to get less still it does not this bill does not say because we can't we're not going to be we're no longer going to be generating money from real estate taxes we're going to eliminate consideration of your ability to pay on the basic education so we're still going to get less under basic education well let's let's move to the first chart that you have let's discuss that because it's unlikely said it lays the foundation for a lot of this i don't want to say anti s p seventy six but you know for us it's certainly is and i want to point out that the figures that we're looking at here because of the program seen all over the pittsburgh area the figures we're looking at here basically just deal with peter's timeship but the ramifications certainly deal with every district and that's always had it's not just oh well was us it is a case where every high achieving school district in the state not just  every better to do community will be suffering under these kind of guidelines because of the fact that they've said they don't they haven't taken into consideration a lot of the ramifications so if we can look which is the page number on legislature or that real estate taxes are increasing at an alarming rate and they hear that from their constituents and there's this assumption that it's because all this talk spending is way out of hand and that we are just have uncontrolled irresponsible spending and with no consideration of the facts on the residence and i can assure you that in the conversations that we've had on our budget that's not the case here and i expect that not the case anywhere in the senate bill does nothing to look at why real estate taxes are increasing but i did this one particularly to show that it is even going to hurt our district which has done a really good job  constraining cost while getting good academic great academic results well i want to point out something here that our recent audit demonstrated that we were less than what one half of one percent from the amount we budgeted to the amount spent over a period of a year yes so not only is our spending good but we have also done a good job of trying to project our revenues and our expenses such that you know the budgeting office and our financial office has done a really good job and has the expectations down in the knowledge to project in the future our spending needs and our revenue well in general why don't you go ahead and discuss their specific  we'll go from there so on the left side is expenditures for student and that just shows you that in peter's township the red line is this spending per student that peters township has  since two thousand and eight to two thousand and fifteen and the gray line above it is a comparison to all other four hundred ninety nine districts in the state of pennsylvania so you can see that our spending per student a little more than thirteen thousand dollars is significantly less than what other districts are spending across the state on the right you'll see that we're we're spending this money but we're also getting great academic results and this is p s s a is a state standardized test given in multiple grades in english science and math and it shows that the red line of peter's township districts that have done a good job of constraining spending real estate taxes in our district have not gone up because we have uncontrolled spending we're spending in a very reasonable cost in fact there's only sixty six districts across the state of pennsylvania that spend less per student than we are getting good academic results and if this is going to negatively affect us then you should really take a strong will at the legislation ok let's move on to the  background it is going to look at every district's budget and say in last year district what did you receive in real estate tax collections less the amount that you paid on your debt so any debt service payments bonds that we have outstanding standing they're going to reduce from an amount and they say ok in year one distribution from this this fund that we're going to create we're going to pay you the amount that you received in collections less the amount of your debt service payments last year it does nothing to say or address what has caused  the expenditures to have to increase and these are a list of some of the costs across the state that are mandated expenses meaning the district has very little  change the expenses and those are pension special education cost increases build into collective bargaining agreements cyber charter cyber charter costs and health care costs are those are the  legislation does nothing to help districts restrain those costs i believe that once you get into the actual cost of these programs of the public wonder stand that these are areas that not only don't we have any control over but we have major expenditures from our budget that are not funded to us even though th and it's important to note that the pension program for teachers is a state mandated program the district has no control over what benefits are received or what it costs and  so we pay whatever the state tells us to pay and it's paid as a percentage of a teacher's income so for instance if a teacher's income is one hundred thousand  dollars and the piece earns rape say is five percent you would pay the teacher the one hundred thousand dollars and then in addition to that you send off five percent of that salary to the state so that's the piece or contribution is the percentage of a teacher's salary and this graph just shows you that starting in two thousand and ten this state realize that its pension was underfunded and it needed more contributions and so what it did was it raised the percentage of a teacher's salary that this districts had to pay to the state each year by a significant amount so on the right in the gallo you could see that in two thousand and ten not too long ago we had a forty nine million dollar budget and our peace or cost accounted for two point eight seven percent of that come to two thousand and eleven twelve and i believe actually that should be maybe sixteen seventeen our piece cost for a fifteen nine million dollars budget was twelve point five percent and one thing i want to point out is the low are talking about these pension cost they're not just for teachers the judges who role in these cases of whatever districts have brought cases to the commonwealth court and the state supreme court they receive the same benefits so the idea that they're going to change the program that they reap the benefits from is very limited best and it has in fact been proven through the courts that every time this has come it has been slapped down by the judges mean it's not a case where this is of this is not an anti teacher this is a pension problem that we have which is unfunded and i believe in our last budget one of the line items at the very end of it is that the district owes eighty six million dollars so we're eighty six but we're not the only one all the districts throughout the state receive the same kind of news that their portion of the unfunded budget or mandate for the pensions and  our case last year was eighty six million but that's just one one five hundredth of whatever this or so throughout the state right daunting yes it is all right we're going to go to the next page plays i want effect of these increasing pension rates is the fact that you have to try and keep salary costs low and in our district last year this graph just represents the fact that i'm pressure on the board last year to keep salaries low and we went through a very painful strike as a result of that but this just shows that you know the efforts that were made the blue portion of the graph is the minimum salary increase that was reached in the new collective bargaining agreement that goes through twenty twenty one and we want to you know we want to also demonstrate that the union realized that we had financial issues coming into the future so it's not a case that they were being run unrealistic it was a case that we were trying to meet happily in the middle which  they gave up and we gave up and it worked out for the betterment of the district at this point but this believe in though it has been languishing for twelve years in the state senate has a better chance of being passed and one of the one of the local state representatives richard cohn one of our i was in his office a couple weeks ago and he said one of them one of the benefits of this state bills will be able to control costs the only problem is they didn't take anything th consideration that you've tried to do that you came up with a reasonable agreement with the union and now you're going to have a tough time even meeting that yet so that's a that's the bigger issue that we have is that everybody came together to to for the betterment of the district and now we're going to have financial problems of this bill goes through so the fact that's correct that has even if you kept salaries as zero percent increase later on you in the presentation you will see that the districts cost even from this year to from last year to this year five hundred thousand dollars salary increase by two thousand and that's if there were no increase in all so that's the type of pressure that is on districts but is not necessarily going to be funded through any increases in any state funding from the state from senate bill seventy six so as we talked about previously and we never talked about how they would find this money that would come from the state and that's really important to know to know your real estate taxes will be going down and we will tell you that they will not be totally eliminated what how will be funded by an increase in the personal income tax rate and  we're not just talking about a slight increase we're talking about the way of the earned income tax going up sixty percent we're talking about the sales tax in washington county going from six to seven percent in allegheny county going from seven to eight percent but we're talking about now a tax on haircuts we're talking about tax on medicine those tax on over the counter medicines tax on a funeral expenses i mean i mean this is this is going to be so broadened that in fact and end they're also talking about an increase in the increased tax on gasoline sales after we just had a ten percent or a ten cent increase of the january first so this is not just talking about you know pocket change here we are talking about substantial increases across the board of anything and that was it was put to me that anything  that's not on the whip list will be taxed so if you're going to buy ground meat that's one thing but if you're going to buy steak that's going to be taxed if you're going to buy realize that the so you know if you're going to buy breed cheese that's going to be tax but you know american cheese and slices well you know so i mean it's it's just crazy to imagine what's going to happen as far as the taxes just the taxes go and in a community like ours there are people that spend money on many items your vacations will be taxed your you know i mean they'll be a lot of things anything you buy within the state will have a tax on belt and they're actually trying to push things on the internet so that you get tax higher if you buy something that's i mean like i said i don't want people to think well you know ok slight increase like this ten cents a gallon we've been able to live through it for the first month that's fine now we're talking about a potential thirty seven per gallon additional gas tax our state board association that had the independent this office of pennsylvania which is an independent office to do revenue projections on different legislation to try to figure out ok how much will this cost of living increase b and they said anywhere from zero to six percent now in our projections you can you know they're short term projections which they did this revenue projection a few years ago for some prior  legislation they didn't project a recession so they said it's anywhere from zero to six percent but they said on an average think of it any between you know two and five percent zero to five percent so on the left hand side you would see  distributions and the cost of living increase at zero percent two percent to five percent and then if you go over to the right side you'll see just the pension costs how much it increased each year and you know you will see when you compare those numbers that those cost of living and increases in many years won't even cover our increase in pension costs and we've only talked about the first mandated expense of our so at this point this is what becomes gary is that even at the projections they have from year won we may not be able to even pay increases in our pensions and that's once again that's not a program cost and i think i and if i remember correctly you do have in here on the how much the school board actually has the ability to deal with this far as what we have control over that's very very small and i believe it's in the graph here  but that's you know i said it it's one of those things that whenever the state has kicked the pension program problem down the street for seventy years and it didn't i mean it didn't start off with just our recent governors it goes back to you know six seven years ago are six or twenty years ago whenever they were the funds were coming in great you know one time the school district received the one million plus in interest payments just coming to our bank account i think last year well we got something twenty two thousand or so but it's very very yeah so i mean there's a vast difference when you have over a million dollars versus that of twenty thousand what we're going to be doing is taking a break now we have a class change here and we're going to take a break for commercial and we'll be back on the other side of the  parents sure have their hands full and they could use an extra hand now every state offers free or low cost health insurance for your sports hero or budding artist kids up to age nineteen can get checkups doctor and dentist visits hospital care prescriptions and more your child's may qualify based on your family size an encounter it's one less thing to worry about call or go online to enroll now why  wait thank you very much for coming back our guest today is lisa anderson who happens to be a fellow board member here peters township once again lisa we we've been talking so far just  really the pension costs and how it is skewed our potential for a budget why don't we now talk about the second elephant in the room and that would be special education funding and this is also in addition to pension are they are two of the biggest strains on this school did district budget and it's not a string meaning that it's not an unnecessary part of our spending but it's because national education  side and graph on the bottom special education funding that we get from the state remember it comes in in three buckets special education funding basic education funding and then a small grant so our special education funding has been completely flat since zero one zero zero two and yet the graph on top of the red that is the increases in cost to us for special education funding so that graphically represents that we are spending a huge amount on special education that's not being funded by the state and even if you just look in the last five years that's to a tune of twenty two million dollars meaning in the last five years peter's township and i betcha there's a lot of districts just like us that spent twenty two million dollars more on special education funding then it received a special education cost than it received in funding from the state and and and that's extraordinary well and you know we look at other districts like the city of pittsburgh pays like twenty two thousand per student but was enlightening the other day is they have buildings assigned for special education students it's not five or ten or twenty they actually have facilities that have been set aside and i believe the number was two or three that have actually been set aside and these are special cases these are just having a teacher in there many of these cases you have to have and we have a case where we have to have a person riding with the with the child on a bus am we needed to buy vans with air conditioning to meet their requirements in some cases we have one student that we have to send to a school that cost us sixty thousand dollars a year so those total cost can be over one hundred thousand dollars per student so it's not like when we talk about our expenditure of thirteen thousand per student this exasperates our budget because we have as you pointed out we have no control over that that is a mandate a fund that we have and that special education doesn't cost and doesn't bring in the cost of extemporaneous things like legal expenses if somebody you know falls a complaint or something we have to then defend that complaint and so those out of this will cost are above and beyond what you just mentioned of five years and spending over twenty million dollars that would hit anybody's budget and i don't care who you are so and exactly and it is not that it's inappropriate that's an appropriate spending that is what the districts have to do to accommodate that student and the funding that goes along with that man should come and rise equally with that but as you can see by that bottom graph our our founding has been completely flat and so one of the things that people can say is that well you're spending too much peters township but if you go on to the next slide you'll see that that's not the case that if you look at how much we're spending per student our special education expenditures per student and i compare this just across washington county you'll see that we're on the lower end of the list so far it's not that we're spending on reasonably shows that we're spending recently it's just that the funding that comes from the state has been completely  flat and deficit to our district and one of the things that i will point out in the special education is is an important aspect of what the district has considers a part of the overall education package the special education program so the word is out that our program is excellent and we and we had fact have you know years of a revolving door and that department has ended with our current director of special ed and not only has it ended though but the people that we have in support of the education for special ed students throughout our history is actually it and the word is out and realtors are telling everybody while we think that's wonderful the additional cost on every education and every special ed student becomes the district exasperates our budget even more so while we have an excellent program and we are proud of that  people one other districts are not coming to peter stacia because of that fact that just you know oil rig hard as you pointed out to in fact offer them all their program requirements which cost us much more money actually be noted that how this relates to the senate bill seventy six is that senate bill seventy six doesn't have anything to do with special education funding it's a different pot but if your costs are increasing beyond what special education funding you're getting right now we have the ability to raise real estate taxes to cover those costs we will not be able to do that under senate bill seventy six it's going to be a straight cost of living increase so you can do nothing to anticipate or to deal with increasing costs with level funding well in what we talk about that though and then you and i have talked about that this specifically  what do you do well you have to start program cutting well senate bill seventy six gives the ability to districts who believe that they need more funds to raise either people back their real estate taxes they'll be happy to write that check under referendum and i had a hard time with that because as i expressed to him he should go back to logic one zero one if you give me back my money and then ask for it back i'm not going to be real happy to in fact write that check because of the fact that out of the kindness of your heart you allowed me to have my cash yes and it should be noted also that in almost every district across the state senate bill seventy six well not totally eliminate your real estate taxes what each district is going to be permitted to do and will have to do is to keep the amount of serry to pay your debt service payments in the future so for districts who debt service goes out thirty years or twenty five years which are many districts ours again we've been very reasonable in ours only goes out fifteen years but it means that we would look each year and say how much would it cost us to pay our debt service which in our districts is about four and a half million dollars and then we would be allowed to set our real estate milledge sufficient to collect that debt service payment each year so you're going to be asked to increase your personal income tax increase your state sales tax and then you're going to still have a real estate tax it's going to be you know probably anarchistic ten percent in some districts who get most of their money from the state it's going to be a significant portion of your real estate is going to remain and then to ask us to go back and if we need any more money to ask you to increase your local personal income tax beyond that i just don't think it as being a reasonable expectation that people would buy into that well and what the other thing that we were talking about the other day was you don't get the tax write off on your income tax as for your real estate tax so then if if a person in peter's times have an eight thousand dollars for school tax is unreasonable in as far as the amount that the average is paying so then you won't get that tax deduction so a person or a family in a thirty five percent tax bracket is going to still have to not pay taxes on that money which will equate to something like three thousand dollars and so you know want to we're talking about this all these other taxes increase now your federal tax will increase automatically because of the fact that you don't have that the duction anymore and i said it just goes on and on and on and so that initial oh you're going to get your real estate taxes well no you're going to have your debt service tax period you're going to keep that so that maybe you have fifteen to two thousand dollars and then you're going to lose that tax deduction and that's going to be three thousand dollars and then you're going to have and the families around here spend more than twenty thousand dollars which is going to make up the difference you know so whenever you're looking at the haircuts and everything that we talked about earlier this bill does not and this graph just shows the relationship between how the pension and special education cost really affected our milledge increases and compare that to to show that they mainly service the reason why we had to increase real estate taxes so on the left hand side you see the red bars and those are the two milledge increases that we have on the right the tan are the increases in both special education and pension costs expressed in a military man out but that does not talk about salary increases increasing gasoline increase in bus cost and it doesn't talk about any of those now it's just special education and pension costs so if you compare you'll see in both the no levon twelve and thirteen fourteen the cost of an increase in special education and pension actually exceeded the amount that we raise taxes so in those two years we had the internally have cost cutting measures to absorb the increases in cost and so those costs weren't passed on to the residence and any other three years you could see that that hand graph makes up a large portion of the actual tax millage increase so you can see that those two expenses are really a large reason private real estate taxes have increased that this senate bill seventy six does nothing to constrain those costs so they're going to be paid it's just that it's going to be paid in another fashion so it does nothing to control the  power they're going to fund paid at the expense of programs and things that we offer currently right because right now we have the ability to raise real estate income really state taxes to pay for them in the future when we don't the only option and will get into that is to cut programs and well you said as i mentioned earlier it's great you know and we've been in the process for the last year and a half on the plane caught on looking at either rehabbing our buildings and or building a new but that cost what have to be adjusted into the real estate cost if we have a service that goes up to do those things you know we've looked at the what was of the high  and dry aspect of just what our facilities will need in the next ten years and that is programmed to be approximately twenty four million but as we've looked at just rehabbing this with this one building and really does it's crazy is comparison to what we're now paying which i'm sure many folks feel the we're paying too much in taxes but this bill does nothing to curtail those and number of dollars so and when one thing you mentioned was about any future building cost in human sort of insinuate or fly in implied that we would be able to raise real estate taxes in order to pay for new debt service that's not accurate in that senate bill seventy six basically says that we're allowed to have a real estate tax remaining but it only could be for debt service that exists now if you want to do any future funding under seventy six it appears to me that the only source of funds you could get is to increase the personal income tax so you wouldn't have the ability to raise the income tax for future debt service passed or you would have to do that through the referendum and ask you know district residents to pay additional income tax just and i will point out also that this bill is not based on a future budget this bill is based on a past budget so the monies that you're going to get are to including the freeze that as increases in salaries and everything else that you've already agreed to it's what was happening last year so you know there's no way that the district could have made a move to make it less painful because of the fact that they said there's a it's a future bill that one of the legislators have told us that we may be coming up in june or could come up faster but is based on a past budget that we didn't have anything on when we controlled our monies that much as possible yes yes the next line talks about in another factor that  s cyber charter schools and just a preface there's a lot of people don't know that cyber students who choose to go to a cyber charter school actually cost the district money you may see advertisements on t v saying that they are tuitions their tuition free to a parent because the parent does not have to pay money out of their pocket for their child to go to cyber charter as versus going to the local catholic schools parent exercise a check exactly exactly there's the cyber charter schools do charge tuition and who pays it is the home district for any peters township student who goes to a cyber charter school right now we have to pay tuition for a regular education student about ten thousand dollars a year and for a special education student it's approximately fifteen thousand dollars a year so that is money that the district follows the student to the cyber charter schools so it cost us money now in peter's township we have done a really great job of having those numbers be small by last year during the strike  saw an increase in cyber charters in rollman so it's something that would cost us more and we would have an ability to deal with that through a real estate  learned that their children might be going to school through the end of june and some of them had family commitments or programming commitments where they said that's not something i'm willing to do i'm going to go to cyber charter so you c see exactly where the strike occurred where we publicized what the new calendar would be and how the increase in cyber charter students went from in the low forty's to eighty four students now  that's something that was beyond our control and expectations but if we could not get those students back it would cost us an additional four hundred thousand dollars and that only of all of those were basic education students so at a minimum it would cost us four hundred thousand dollars you see that that high of eighty four was reached in february one february when we were doing the budget for this year you can say to yourself we need to like expect that those students might not come back because at that time we didn't have a contract and we would expect that there would be more students going to cyber charter if we would not have had a contract before then so you have the ability in your budget account for those extra students going or not coming back and senate bill seventy six they don't take into account any any of that sort of things so if you have something that happens in your dish strict you're not to get any more money to cover time and again how do you cover four hundred thousand dollars with extra expenses you don't really do a great job of budgeting how much our expenses are going to be and how much our revenue is going to be when you don't have any control over the revenue portion how do you do that well another thing with as you pointed out that whatever these advertisements say is free education it may seem like it's free education for people in the city schools and things like that in philadelphia and pittsburgh but actually seventy percent of that is falling upon the rest of the community to pay so whatever we know what we're looking at our budget and that ten thousand dollars going to that one student over seventy seven thousand dollars are packed coming out of the pockets of our local taxpayers to pay for that parent's choice to send their kids to cyber school so l a said it's not a fair process when you look at who's actually paying the bill for that person's decision so well let's let's lay so we seven tons of stuff here look at yes now the next line is again just showing that the independent fiscal  office had anticipated that the cost of living increases that we would get off of our first as distribution from the state would be two to three percent and if you follow the arrow down you can see our actual percentage in real estate  collections over the past few years which were about six and a half percent and for us five percent so you could see already we're not going to be getting the increases in revenue that we've received in the past and while you might say well that's because you're increasing them you know too much i'm going to try and explain a sort of  difficult many is that there's two ways that you can get an increase in real estate tax revenues one is to increase your real estate tax millage so that everybody gets a higher bill but the other is growth in new construction so if you go to the new the next slide it shows you that within there that six and a half percent and five percent increase in real estate tax revenues that wasn't soley because  raise real estate taxes there's a growth factor so new construction brings in more revenue that wasn't taxed before so these next set of slides on the left shows you how much the assessed value of real estate has increased in peters township since two thousand and nine and you can see it see that there's a significant amount of growth so on the right hand side it shows you that the their revenue that's generated by the new construction on the blue bars what's really interesting is when you look at the red bars because that's the revenue generated if we never raise taxes all of that every single bit of that revenue under seven senate bill seventy six because you're no longer taxing districts with real estate taxes it's coming from the personally so you lose out on all of  as much other districts but if you haven't because we don't have a large proportion of commercial property it's only i think about nine point seven percent of the assessed value in peter's township but there are some districts that have huge shopping complex that this is going to be tremendous shifting the cost of education across the state because it eliminates all real estate property taxes which includes commercial so basically what they're saying is right now businesses have a hand in paying for education at the local level account future contractual obligations that you have and that you take into account this growth factor in real estate taxes that we talked about in addition you talk about being able to pay with these with lots of different things so this is just a function to show this this slide about what contractual obligations do you have in your collective bargaining agreements say that you have to take into account that senate bill seventy six want one of which that jumps is the jumps down which we had a lot of public discussion about you know last year but just know that in our district and in many districts what happens are teachers are in their salary increase is based on a set salary scale so in your wine you make x in year two in year three and it sat salary standard scale that everybody goes through and a lot of them have what's called a jump step at the end where you know that you're going to get a sizable raise at the end but it's sort of deferred so that you're making less in the beginning of the i will tell you it's extremely difficult in negotiations to change something like this but it's a huge cost so that we know in our district in i believe it's twenty twenty one we have a large number of teachers who are reaching this johnstone meaning that they're going from one year to announce they're going to get a forty thousand dollars raise we have twenty five teachers reaching them in twenty twenty lines and that alone just that alone will cost the district over a million what a million dollars means to us as far as the overall state tax goes we're really not sure still what the new is going to be but we were getting about three hundred forty thousand per mill so that means just in that that's just for those twenty five teachers that's three mils of taxes now of most people don't understand districts like charters valley when they raise one mill they get over one point two or three million dollars so we could actually hire two teachers for their cost and benefits they can hire substantially more and hire ten or eleven for their for their salary based on everything else so what we're looking at these things comparing it to apples to oranges whenever one district says that they're going to raise milledge a half percent and everybody says wide in june raise it a half well a half percent for us on the old mill or to be one hundred seventy thousand and for them to be almost seven hundred thousand so whenever you know you said so whenever you see these things in the paper the district raised if they're in allegheny county they raise half a mill but charters value also has great southern shopping center they have a large commercial complexes which have an impact fed into their educational fun well if they don't have that anymore like he said when we're talking statistically about peter's timeship we're painting with a wide brush and all these districts are going to have issues with this program so  to the next slide where when like i said when we negotiated the contract we had to figure out how to pay for the job step cost one way we can do that is with our debt service payments each year our debt service payment is going to go down this slide on the lab shows that from two thousand and sixteen to two thousand and twenty one our debt service payments will be reduced by about four hundred ninety one thousand dollars so when we agreed to all the collective bargaining agreement costs we said we projected out and say ok we're going to save this amount of money and debt service payments we can apply to pay pay for that increase in a jump step but in seventy set the senate bill seventy six you can't do that and we're no longer going to be able to generate that because each here under senate bill seventy six we're only going to be able to set the millage at the rate in which we are going to be our debt service payment is going to be out so in this instance we are losing our on this savings every year that we would have had from reducing debt service payments which we could use to pay for continuing operations we can no longer have the opportunity to have that income my presentation that i wanted to make was there's this idea that somehow you know the current funding is unfair and this would be a way to make it fairer senate bill seventy six well what you have to understand is that it's based on revenue collection that the distributions that districts would get is based on a distribution from revenue based on revenue that was collected in the prior year well it serves logical that if a district is spending a lot more per student they're going to have had to generate more revenue and so that their revenue that they're going to get from the state under senate bill seventy six is going to be larger is that fair or not well if you that this slide was a comparison of a neighboring district on the left it shows how similar we are in income the number of students and students receiving a reduced lunch so by all means we should be getting similar funding but that district is currently spending a lot more  township by the tune of five thousand dollars per student which means they had to generate more revenue which then you could see on the right hand side because they had more real estate tax collections they're going to get more inequalities in districts that should not occur so there and i get more in their funding from the state than we currently pay for each student our of that we currently just receive from the state yes because their them the money that they received in real estate tax collections was higher than ours so they will as essentially get sixteen hundred dollars more per student than peters township with and we're sitting in exactly the same place  same academic same socioeconomic so it does nothing to make it fair but then also we have to point out the there that services twice what ours are so they're real estate tax based on their current debt service will be higher to go in so when we look at all those other costs that we're talking about those people are actually going to be in worse shape it in the we only have a couple minutes left so let's summarize i mean this summarization is that i would you know ask any other district neighboring districts to contact in residence in our district to contact your lawyers leaders if you or look into it more and do some research because i would encourage people to ask them to first look at mandated costs and reducing those expenses to the district because at that point you may not need real estate tax changes and if you do they could be done in a way that is just more more efficient and effective because right now we have the ability within those mandated cost increases to pay for them it is three real estate tax increases and that puts a lot of pressure on everybody but you have an ability to pay for them if you don't have the money coming in and you no longer have the ability to generate those revenues because they're coming from the state you're but change programs well the the the changing programs or what always causes the people to wake up there are a couple things that we haven't looked at and one is the property values this do right now people people moving to peter's times because of low taxes the property that they can get a half acre lot usually and the school district those are the three reasons people move in they move into the wide open spaces if they no longer have if we no longer have the benefit of really low real estate taxes then what happens to the property values property values have gone up significantly in the past  if that levels off then once again is this a new form of taxation where you're losing money in your property value the township has a plan that in fact is going to bring they're trying to bring ten thousand more people into the community naturally since i went to school here in the sixty's the times of has grown by four thousand people every ten years while they're trying to do that in the next few years and that will overwhelm every building we have in the district so we'll have to look at renewed construction all right so there's a lot of things here that this bill is not paying attention to and the township isn't paying attention to whenever it comes to its effect on our district lisa i'd like to thank you very much for coming in this is a program that i know that the state has look at that now to in fact start spreading the the rumor on at the end of the program you'll see a list of your local state washington thirty representatives and state senators to please call them and tell them this may not be a bad bill but in this current position it does not benefit our community and i don't believe it's going to benefit really any community is going to cause higher taxes so thank you for visiting with us today on talking politics a western