Alburgh residents approve $8.2 million school budget in Tuesday vote

ALBURGH – Alburgh voters approved a proposed $8.2 million budget funding the Alburgh Town School District during a special election on Tuesday.
According to preliminary results shared Tuesday evening, voters favored the revised budget by a nearly two-to-one margin, with 166 voters supporting the Alburgh Town School District’s proposed budget and only 94 residents opposing the proposed spending plan.
The budget voters weighed on Tuesday was intended to support both the operation of the Alburgh Community Education Center, as well as tuition payments for older Alburgh students attending high school outside of the Champlain Islands. The proposed spending plan also included Alburgh’s share of the larger Grand Isle Supervisory Union’s annual budget.
The roughly $8.2 million entertained by voters marked a modest reduction from the $8.3 million budget voters defeated in March and again in May. Local school officials agreed in May to trim $50,000 from their original spending plan, an amount officials expected to come from the maintenance budget for the Alburgh Community Education Center.
According to officials, additional spending cuts would have likely had to have come from cutting staff at the Alburgh Community Education Center and, save for some local support positions, would have been legally difficult to approve due to language in the Alburgh school district’s teaching and support staff contracts that placed a legal deadline for new staffing cuts well before the district’s latest election.
“If there were large changes that needed to be made, contractually we cannot touch staffing at this point,” Lisa Ruud, the superintendent for the Grand Isle Supervisory Union, confirmed during an Alburgh school board meeting in May.
According to local election officials, turnout on Tuesday was slow, as was typically the case for special elections in Alburgh.
“I’d say it’s probably on par with other budget votes,” Danielle James Choiniere, the town clerk in Alburgh, told The Islander. “It feels about the same.”
Early voting before polls opened on Tuesday was also consistent for special elections in Alburgh despite the short turnaround. By Tuesday morning, according to Alburgh officials, 52 people had already cast their ballots either through voting early in-person or through mailing in a completed ballot.
School officials in Alburgh had prepared a quick turnaround for their next election after voters rejected their proposed spending plan for a second time in May. According to Alburgh officials, the rush for an early June election was spurred by a statewide deadline requiring that school districts have a locally-approved budget by the start of the next fiscal year in July.
Under Vermont law, school districts without an approved spending plan are allowed to borrow money for up to 87% of their current operating budget until a new budget is approved by voters. According to Alburgh officials, having to borrow funding and operating under a reduced budget would likely add to local expenses through interest payments and risked dramatically upending school programming.
The special election on Tuesday marked the third time this year that voters in Alburgh were asked to approve a spending plan for their local school district. On both Town Meeting Day and again in May, voters in Alburgh rejected an initial $8.3 million spending plan, with the budget’s rejection during a special election in May ultimately being decided by only a single vote.
According to school officials, smaller school districts like Alburgh’s struggled with budgeting this year amid growing costs for benefits like health care and dental insurance, as well as the amount districts budgeted for contractually-mandated increases in teaching and support staff salaries.
Local education taxes, which were expected to grow to around $1.83 for every $100 of a property’s assessed value according to the Alburgh school district’s most recent projections, were only partially hiked through a proposed increase in school spending. In Vermont, school taxes are also swayed by changes in statewide spending, demographics and local real estate sales.
Like other towns in Northwest Vermont, local property taxes in Alburgh were skewed mainly by a tight housing market that raised property prices above their assessed values. The resulting common level of appraisal, a ratio weighing property prices and property values, disproportionately distorted education taxes in Alburgh under the state’s formula for calculating local school taxes.
It remains unclear what a finalized tax rate might look like in Alburgh, as state lawmakers have yet to formally approve a yield bill establishing statewide education taxes or expected legislation that would apply around $100 million in existing state funds to suppress a statewide increase in school taxes first projected by Vermont’s Dept. of Taxes in December.
Those bills were expected to eventually pass through Vermont’s state legislature over the coming days as the current legislative session comes to its anticipated close.
With roughly 200 students between its prekindergarten programming and its elementary and middle school classes, the Alburgh Community Education Center is Grand Isle County’s largest public school.