The Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly voted to approve the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District total budget at their Tuesday night meeting, but not after lengthy deliberation. The borough has set the floor of the school funding from local sources for Fiscal Year 2022 at $45M. An appropriation from Borough Mayor Charlie Pierce’s budget would set the school funding at $48M. After adding together the school district operations, borough maintenance, utilities, insurance, audit and custodial services, the total education budget was estimated at $146,281,298.
Kenai Peninsula Borough Mayor Charlie Pierce, “It is a process that we’re required to do when the school district provides us with the board approved budget. We have I think 30 days to set a floor, a minimum amount that we can fund. Now, to enlighten everybody as to how the discussions have gone, it was mentioned that we started with 40 and we were starting with 40 when we were looking at a roughly 16-17% decline in sales tax revenue. That was very early. Remember, recall we had the number of chords that we still had no information on. So we were being conservative and we were giving factuals and were giving numbers based off of what we knew. We’re still hedging when we say set the bar at 45 and go to 48.”
A proposed amendment that would have increased the floor from $45M to $48M failed on a 7 to 2 vote. Also, a majority of the deliberation and debate at last night’s meeting was focused on if two assemblymen can vote on the school budget due to their employment or relation to someone who is employed in the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District.
With the passing of Resolution 2021-033 for the school district budget and the passing of Resolution 2021-19, two public hearings will be held appropriating funds for Fiscal Year 2022 in the mayor’s budget proposal. The hearings are scheduled for May 18th and June 1st.