What's Up With That

Isn’t the 5-year total receipts over/under budget $77,675,258? Doesn’t that translate into $23,725,000 more revenue than expenses over the same period?

I wonder why you didn’t highlight all of the truth in your chart.

Sincerely,
Smarter Than You

@Smarter Than You – great name! It made me smile!

My chart is by no means a comprehensive view. Most importantly it is not an accrued financial statement. I put it up so that citizens can see that we have a clear trend of exceeding our budgeted expenses. In particular, we have a stable electricity expense yet consistently under-budget what we reasonable expect to pay for this budget item. Ditto for legal fees. Why would we do this?

You are correct about the revenue total on my chart. One driver for this positive is the stimulus funds we received. But what you do not account for is that in addition to our budget (that contained many under-budgeted items: electricity, legal fees, etc.) our district was paying $25-30 million/yr on items that were not budgeted. Those expenditures were wearing away our reserves. Yet another matter is that our operating budget reports were reported on a cash basis and this overstated our reserves. So the liabilities that belonged to a fiscal year were not reported in our board financial reports. The largest was accrued salary payments to personnel earned in one fiscal year but paid in another.

The gravity of this situation is that we have started the FY2013 in deficit. There was a public Budget Committee meeting today at which we discussed the matter of our deficit with the GDOE CFO and the DeKalb CFO.

Hope this information is helpful. Smarter than me? Maybe! But not today!

I hope the county realizes that they have just added an extra week in August and a few days at the end of May that will increase their electricity bills. Why we all want to spend more money on electricity by having kids in school during the hottest weather months is beyond me.

I am so thankful for you!! I know we wouldn’t have gotten the results we have without you. I’m sorry if you are no longer a part of the Board at present, but run again. I and many others will vote for you!!! You have done a world of good for our children, and I don’t have the words to tell you how wonderful that is!!!!!!!! God Bless!

[…] the budget was “a document based on deception”. The SACS Special Review Visit Report contains my research regarding the budget. Anyone can access my blog and see the research I’ve posted. There are a […]