School Committee, Residents Question FinCom on Reduced Budgets

Schedule a meeting to discuss a possible 10 percent budget cut to Wayland schools, and you’ll likely attract a crowd too big for the meeting room.

That’s what happened Monday night as residents packed shoulder to shoulder in the School Committee hearing room for a discussion between the School Committee and the Finance Committee about the recently released budget guidelines for Fiscal Year 2014.

In those guidelines, the FinCom requested two operating budget submissions from all departments: A level-service budget that includes only required increases (contracted salary increases, utility increases, etc.) and a prioritized list cutting about 10 percent from the budget in order to “help mitigate the potential tax impact for residents.”

But more than a dozen people spoke up Monday to say they didn’t want to sacrifice the schools on the altar of tax rates.

The Finance Committee arrived at the 10 percent number by looking at the amount of free cash applied to last year’s budget – which will not be available for FY14 – in addition to the roughly 5 percent year-over-year increases that are contractually necessary or otherwise outside of the town’s control.

Debt payments, contracted salaries and other items cannot be cut and those items, even without typical cost-of-living expenses, are expected to increase the budget by about 5 percent in FY14, explained FinCom Chair Bill Steinberg. The FinCom has heard from residents requesting a flat budget and the committee wants to examine the possibility of that request, but achieving a level budget would require cuts to compensate for obligatory increases.

“We know that this is a painful process,” Steinberg said. “It gets into people salaries, their lives and is not a fun thing to deal with. The Finance Committee is looking at ways to understand what our options are for the current year. What if the town decides, ‘We want to have a FY13 budget in FY14’? We can’t ignore that.”

In a letter to the editor submitted the day after the meeting, the Finance Committee said it did not expect to ultimately recommend a 10 percent cut across the board to Town Meeting.

“Rather, the point of the exercise is to start a healthy, robust and respectful discussion among residents regarding the inevitable trade-offs between the costs and benefits of providing services, in part so as to negotiate an appropriate tax rate for our residents,” the letter reads.

School Committee member Ellen Greico said that a 10 percent reduction to the Wayland Public Schools budget would be “devastating.”

“We all know that the most significant impact of this is the schools,” Grieco said. “It’s about jobs. Doing the analysis just for the sake of the analysis is very harmful.”

School Committee Chair Barb Fletcher asked for the Finance Committee to provide direction on whether the prioritized list for reduction could be a general list rather than a specific item by item description. She acknowledged that this kind of process takes place in the private sector, but that this type of assessment was a “very, very difficult conversation to have in public.”

Throughout the room, residents spoke up to voice their disapproval of such a dramatic cut to school budgets. Some individuals who have been vocal about Wayland’s budget process of late spoke up to say they never wanted to cut school budgets by 10 percent, but rather hoped to tighten the process in general so residents weren’t over-taxed and free cash surpluses didn’t grow excessively.

“The surplus grew because of a lack of precision in our budgeting,” said Tony Boschetto, who recommended building budgets from zero rather than from the prior year’s funding amount. “What I am asking for is to fix the root cause of that problem. Spend the time doing a root cause analysis. Find out where we’ve over-budgeted – more prudence and precision in our fiscal budgeting process.”

Other residents, however, said they didn’t believe the problem was the budget process, but could be better addressed by continuing to improve the services already offered.

“The reason the tax rate is high is because of math, not because of some systemic problem with our budget,” said former School Committee member Jeff Dieffenbach. “My urging is that we table this idea indefinitely, and we think about continuing to improve our system. We can talk all we want about minus 10 percent, but there is no path to minus 10 percent that doesn’t decimate our schools.”

Yet still other residents said they believed it was possible to find a 10 percent reduction in the schools budget without affecting the quality of Wayland’s education system.

“I think that it’s a mistake to position this as a disagreement as to whether people in this town believe in funding education or not,” said Dave Bernstein. “Hierarchical organizations habitually over-budget at every level. It’s always possible to increase efficiency … without reducing quality.”

The School Committee’s budgets are due to the Finance Committee by Dec. 14.

Editor's Note: The paragraph leading into Mr. Bernstein's quote has been updated to better reflect the context.