NEW SCOTLAND — Voorheesville is looking to increase its tax levy next year by the maximum allowable limit, 6.4 percent.

The increase appears as though it could be the norm for some time as the bill is coming due on the school district’s $25 million capital project, which places the starting point of each year’s levy at a 2.5 percent increase and tacks on from there.

“I’d like to tell the board that this has not been a very easy budget to develop,” the district’s interim business official, Lissa Jilek, told board members on Feb. 3. “And the reason why is the whole capital project and the debt service and the planning as to when are the taxpayers actually going to incur that debt and how much are they going to incur. There’s been an awful lot of conversations about that. So this has not been like an easy rollover budget.

While the total levy may increase as much as 6.4 percent — which is only an estimate and which board members expressed reticence levying to — that may not necessarily correlate into a similar bump in property taxes for residents.  

“So you may have a 6.4 percent theoretical tax cap increase,” Jilek said on Feb. 3, “but that may translate into a lesser tax rate increase,” because even though it’s a 6.4-percent levy increase, the property tax increase could be closer to a 2.5 percent, it all depends on equalization rates and assessed values, numbers which Jilek said she won’t know until at least March. 

Voorheesville’s estimated revenue for next year is about $33.5 million, with $22.3 million coming from the state-set allowable levy limit, up from $21 million this year. For a school district to go over the state-set levy limit, voters need to approve a budget with 60 percent of the vote rather than with a simple majority.

Voorheesville’s other major source of revenue, state aid, is currently set to increase from $9 million to $9.6 million, according to the district. 

Superintendent Frank Macri’s question for the board was: Does the district keep next year’s proposed spending where it is, or “do we look at ways for us to limit that down so our burden on our taxpayer is not 6.4 percent this year?”

One option Macri suggested was that the district could use reserves to pay off its teacher and employee state retirement payments, saying later that may knock half-a-percent off the 3.9 percent of next year’s 6.4 increase that isn’t set in stone, which is the 2.5-percent capital project increase. 

District voters in December 2022 overwhelmingly approved, by 401-to-189, the $25.2 million worth of construction projects, which has two core components: approximately $9.9 million for work at the elementary school and $6.6 million for the construction of a long-sought bus garage.

The bus garage is currently being built behind the high school and across from Cornell Cooperative Extension, parallel to Martin Road. 

The work at the elementary school includes:

— Consolidation of the elementary administrative and health offices next to the existing bus garage, and a transformation the current bus garage into a cafeteria;

— The installation a new secure entrance vestibule; and

— Reworking “existing space to create multiple general instructional spaces, including new music and arts classrooms, guidance suite, library makerspace and science labs,” according to the district.

Macri previously explained the core capital project will end up costing $29 million after 30 years. However, the district is to receive $17.6 million in state aid for those three decades, which brings down local burden to about $11.6 million. 

The project’s total debt service for the first 15 years is about $1.42 million per year, with state aid covering about $922,650 and the remaining $497,000 coming from property taxes, which translates to a 2.5-percent increase in the tax levy.

The final 15 years of debt servicing are to cost about $530,000 annually, with $247,000 per year coming from the state and $276,000 per year from property taxes, and a levy decrease of 1.1 percent.

Board member and former district teacher Kathy Fiero said she wasn’t currently prepared to levy the allowable limit, saying “6.4 is shocking, and I think people are going to go, ‘Oh!’ But at the same time, eggs are $6.99 a dozen. There’s a reality of what the costs are.”

Macri pointed out that the district has an average year-over-year levy increase of between 3.75 percent and 4 percent. “That’s our year-over-year average, right? And with 2.5, you’re already there. So we might be able to get down a little bit, but I’m not seeing us getting down that much anyway, just because of where we typically are.”