Although I received a ton of documentation about the Governor’s new plan — BEP 2.0 — just after his speech on Thursday, it’s taken me a few days of drinking from the fire hose to begin to assess the impact on Oak Ridge.

Here’s the bottom-line data for FY08; the second column from the right, "Difference between February budget and version 1 plan" is the amount of additional state funding each district would expect to receive, over and above the February estimates (already included in our FY08 budget, as adopted).

The question I’ve heard most often so far has been, what does this mean to the Oak Ridge Schools’ budget request from the City? Would that give us enough to meet budgetary needs without the money above the 4.1% increase that Council had planned to allocate?

The answer isn’t a simple one, for several reasons. One, the Legislature hasn’t passed anything yet, so at this point, it’s just a proposal — not a marriage certificate. Secondly, we don’t know the strings that will be attached (one of which will almost certainly be a 3% pay raise, which does carry a local match requirement). Even with the salary increase and local match, it looks like we’d still be okay… but we’d still be using $1.3 million of our fund balance — almost all that remains.

So if the Governor’s proposal does pass in the Legislature, we could go without a local property tax increase, but we’d be heading into the following year with almost no reserves above the 3% that we are forbidden to touch except in narrowly-defined emergencies. If Council would fund our full request this year, it’s far less likely that we would need a larger increase next year.

My question is this: if Council passes a budget sticking to their planned 4% increase and then the new State funding does NOT come through, what then? What would have to be cut from our already meager budget that doesn’t even keep up with the cost of inflation in most items (including salaries)?

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I have mounds of data beyond what I’ve linked to, and am still analyzing it. I also have tax rates and revenues for every school district, income averages, and the proportion of local tax revenues spent on education for each district, so it’s possible to correlate whether the gains in state funding correspond to those which are already doing their fair share at home. My objection to the previous prototype is that it rewarded local governments for NOT doing the right thing, and penalized those that are.

That analysis may take a few more days.

In the meantime, I can relish the satisfaction of knowing that my many hours of studying the BEP and various tax and revenue statistics, frequent trips to Nashville both to BEP Review Committee Meetings and to the Legislature, and efforts to coordinate with board members from other municipal school systems about funding changes has not been a wasted effort. This plan appears to be a good one, if only the Legislature will pass it and move on.

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So much for my challenger’s opinion (in the school board race) that we should focus on getting more local revenue first.