News from the Hill I have been attending the Educational Funding Formula Legislative Committee meetings in Bismarck.  The reason I am doing this is that changes are coming to how schools are funded and one way or another it will affect us.  Some of the major talking points have been: at what point does a school become too small, should the state provide funding for transporting students out of district, and what is the state’s share in...

Funding ND Education? At the beginning of the month I attended the interim committee on educational finance.  I did so because the topic potentially has some big implications on schools like ours.  In the last biennium the governor talked about getting all schools on the formula.  Some schools receive a different per pupil amount due to a law changing funding in the 2012-2013 school year.  For Elgin/New Leipzig this would have been a...

Board Meeting Follow-Up This past September we had talked about a Guaranteed Performance Contract for two weeks in a row, both on September 11th and September 18th.  The vote on the 18th was a tie.  Due to the tie the board voted to table the issue until the October 16th board meeting, when we’ll have the full board present.  Briefly, a tie board vote is considered a no action. There are a few things I want to make sure are plain as...

Municipal Tax-Exempt Lease Purchase Agreement The school district currently has two loans out with the Bremer bank for the boiler project started back in 2016-2017.  These loans were done under a municipal/tax-exempt lease.  This is a lease that allows political subdivisions, such as school districts, to have lower interest rates by virtue of being tax-exempt. A Tax-Exempt Municipal Lease is a conditional sales contract done in the form...

Truth in Taxation Follow-Up On September 11th, 2019 the school district held both a truth in taxation and energy/utility performance contract information session.  I thank the over 20 people who attended to ask questions and become more informed.  Thanks to these people I believe I understand some misunderstandings that need to be cleared up. First and foremost, the truth in taxation meeting was not a meeting held to increase taxes.  It...

Some of you may have noticed the tax meeting notices in the paper. This is something that recently changed in law. Previously these meetings only needed to be held when the taxes requested by a school district increased. This did not always necessarily mean that the school district had increased the mils it was levying. Sometimes increases in property values would increase revenue triggering one of these meetings. Now these meetings will be...