Voorheesville’s proposed budget for 2020-21 is down $325,000 from this year.

Berne-Knox-Westerlo’s superintendent, Timothy Mundell, told The Enterprise this week that, although there is concern about reductions in state aid, he anticipates a “flat, or reduced” tax levy and a budget proposal that is lower than last year’s. 

Normally in April, school boards are adopting budgets and getting ready to ask the public to approve them; not this year. 

Altamont’s tax rates will go down next year, but after Guilderland’s revaluation last year, what property owners actually owe may go up. 

The second phase of Berne-Knox-Westerlo’s $15.8 million project has been completed, and Superintendent Timothy Mundell reports that, now halfway through, the project is on schedule and slightly under budget. 

Altamont’s proposed budget for next year is up about 3 percent over this year. 

Voorheesville schools are in a better financial position going into the 2020-21 budget season than they were around this time last year. 

With an increase of half of a percent in state Foundation Aid for next year and a limit of $1.6 million more to be raised from taxes, the Guilderland schools are hoping to be able to maintain the programs and staff they have with this year’s $102 million budget.

New York State has put into place tax exemptions to encourage development of renewable energy, which played out last week in Duanesburg, a rural Schenectady County town, that granted payments in lieu of taxes, or PILOTs, for two solar farms.

No matter where in the world she was, Lynne Bruning told The Enterprise, the farm in Duanesburg was always “such an anchor,” she said, “to have grown up in the house where my mother’s mother taught me how to sew and I would sleep under her mother’s quilt.”