Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 28, 1994 TAG: 9409280048
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: BRIAN KELLEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG LENGTH: Medium
Supervisors Chairman Larry Linkous said the county will resume correspondence about the agreement - and handing over to the School Board $353,000 that's been held up since February - soon.
But for now, the supervisors believe the School Board isn't giving enough. In turn, School Board members have said the supervisors are asking for too much. The issue is important because the school system is the largest financial component of county government, and its budget has a direct effect on tax rates.
So far, the School Board has agreed to allow the county staff to have read-only computer access to its financial records. The School Board has rejected other reporting conditions the supervisors want to impose on school finances.
As a result, "I'm not ready to hand over the money yet," Linkous said.
The school-county finance dispute goes back 21/2 years, when Linkous and other supervisors said they weren't getting sufficient information on school finances to prepare the county budget.
But the spat developed a new twist in the spring, when the supervisors realized they would have to supply $515,000 in local tax revenues to make up for a faulty estimate of the average daily membership in the school system. If the membership estimate had been correct, that money would have come from the state.
County and school officials blamed each other for the error, and they both produced memos to back up their cases. To try to remedy the shortfall, the supervisors decided to hold back $420,000 they were to have given the schools this year, on the condition the School Board give back the $515,000. The school division rejected the offer.
That meant the School Board had to go into the 1994-95 school year without the $420,000 and with the $353,000 linked to the fiscal reporting agreement still up in the air. Together, that amounts to nearly 2 percent of annual school spending.
"There is no question any time you have cuts of that magnitude you have to make adjustment," school Superintendent Herman Bartlett said Tuesday. "I'm not sure it would be beneficial at this point in time to rehash those cuts."
But Bartlett did say the cuts forced the School Board to remove some teaching positions from its budget, which in turn affected the division's student-teacher ratios.
In a financial update to the board, Assistant County Administrator Jeff Lunsford reported Monday that while the county is in sound financial shape, the school division overspent its allotment by $666,877. It was the first time since 1989 that had happened, and it was largely because of the membership-numbers dispute.
Supervisor Joe Gorman asked if there was any way to prevent the problem from happening again. But Lunsford said the only way would be to make sure the school division used conservative estimates of state and federal revenue when preparing its budget. School officials contend former Superintendent Harold Dodge and his staff did just that in 1993, and it was the county staff and Board of Supervisors that used an inflated state revenue figure to avoid a county tax increase.
"If we can't control it, our general fund is at risk," Gorman said. "There's nothing [the School Board] couldn't steal from."
Moments later, Gorman backed away from that statement, saying it was not "politically correct."
by CNB