Yesterday the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District met to present a more detailed version of their proposed 2015 Fiscal Year budget.
KPBSD Assistant Superintendant Dave Jones told us a bit about the long process of decreasing the deficit the district is currently facing.
Jones: “The Board already has decreased and made cuts of about 1.4 million for the January and February budgets. And now we’re still looking at a rather large deficit of $4,593,000 is where we’re currently looking at with the deficit.”
Jones said that the district has only projected to keep levels of service that they are currently at, not adding anything, however still face that huge deficit.
He also said that legislative talks of raising funding for education have raised hopes of decreasing the deficit but it’s an intricate situation.
Jones: “Because of inflationary costs, school budgets have continued to increase but the problem is that now at the state level the state oil revenues are declining. We’ve been fortunate in the number of the last few years that the price of oil increased to the point where the revenue off of it even though it was declining flow through the pipeline the overall revenue was enough to support or give increases. Now with declining revenue at the state level it’s hard for the legislators to sit down and say ok we have the money to do that. That’s kind of the place we find ourselves in.”
The board will have a Public Budget Forum at Soldotna High School Library February 19 at 5:30pm.