(C) El Paso Matters.org This story was originally published by El Paso Matters.org and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . SISD approves budget with $22 million deficit, approves audit after overcharging taxpayers [1] ['Claudia Lorena Silva', 'More Claudia Lorena Silva', 'El Paso Matters', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width'] Date: 2024-06-28 The Socorro Independent School District school board this week approved a $479.6 million budget with a $22 million deficit for the 2024-25 school year. The budget adopted in a 6-0 vote Wednesday represents a 19% decrease over the current school year’s $594.5 million budget. Trustee Richard Castellano abstained from voting after commenting that the district waited too long to address the deficit. The vote comes after weeks of deliberation over the district’s finances and the recent discovery that it overtaxed homeowners the 2024 tax year by approving a higher tax rate than allowed for district operations. The district plans to reduce this year’s tax rate by the difference and will conduct a forensic audit to find out how the overtaxing happened. SISD reduces budget deficit The SISD school board was initially expecting to approve a budget with a $41 million deficit. The deficit was cut to $25.7 million after trustees voted to reduce the district’s contribution to employees’ health coverage, said SISD Chief Financial Officer Victoria Perez during a June 19 board meeting. Perez said the district also saved money by reducing its substitute teacher budget from $11.8 million to $7.5 million but didn’t indicate how that would be achieved. After working with the Austin-based school finance consulting firm, MoakCasey, the district recalculated its projected revenue and added $3.8 million, reducing the deficit to $22 million, said budget director Susan Olson during Wednesday’s board meeting. If the district is unable to find a way to cover the deficit, it will have to tap into its reserves. This would be on top of a $33 million deficit for the current school year. SISD ended the 2022-23 school year with $72.9 million in reserves, enough to keep the district running for 55 days. SISD over taxes homeowners Acting Superintendent James Vasquez in a June 14 email to parents said that SISD overtaxed homeowners when the school board last year adopted a tax rate higher than permitted by the Texas Education Agency under what’s called the maximum compressed rate. That applies to the portion of the tax rate that pays for day-to-day operations, which school districts are forced to lower when growth in local property values is greater than the statewide average growth. The district’s adopted maintenance and operation rate was 0.0166 cents higher than the maximum compressed rate, which means the owner of a $246,000 home was overcharged about $24 on this year’s SISD tax bill. To help remedy that, the district plans to reduce the upcoming tax rate by an equal amount. How that would impact property owners would depend on their valuations. Before SISD can adopt a tax rate, it must first wait for the El Paso Central Appraisal District to release the final certified value of homes July 25 and for the Texas Education Agency to release the maximum compressed rate Aug. 31. The district will hold a public hearing and adopt a tax rate Sept. 18. The overtaxing issue may have been caused because the district approved the current year’s tax rate in August before the TEA released the maximum compressed rate, TEA conservator Andrew Kim told reporters during a press briefing June 19. “We do want to say that there are school districts in similar situations across the state of Texas,” Kim said. “At this particular point, we had to do a formal review of the process and really rectify that going forward in the future.” TEA conservator Michael Hinojosa said the district will need to conduct an audit to determine exactly how the mistake happened and prevent it from happening again. “The most important thing is to correct it and correct it now. Accountability is important but we don’t know what that’s going to lead us to until there is an appropriate investigation launched by an independent entity,” Hinojosa said. SISD school board approves audit Trustees voted 6-0 during the June 19 board meeting to contract the Houston based firm, Weaver & Tidwell of Houston, to audit the district’s finances. The firm previously conducted an audit for SISD that led the board to place Carman on administrative leave after discovering he awarded contracts to a company he had previously done business with. Weaver & Tidwell representative, Travis Casner, said this audit would be a “smaller scope” than the previous one, but would still be “fairly broad in nature.” He said one of the things the district will look into includes contracts procured between February 2022 and March 2024. The first step of the process will be for the firm to review the work that will need to be done and negotiate the price of the audit with the district, Casner said. [END] --- [1] Url: https://elpasomatters.org/2024/06/28/sisd-budget-deficit-overtax-2024-audit/ Published and (C) by El Paso Matters.org Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 International. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/elpasomatters/