Pasco School Board To Hold Special Session Monday

Pasco County schools are facing a minimum budget shortfall next year of $60 million thanks to cuts on the federal and state level. Now, the district must also face the potential loss of county funding.

A special workshop meeting has been called for tomorrow, March 21, to help board members wrangle with the possible loss of impact fee funding. Impact fees are charged to developers to help pay for the cost of services their projects will require. They are intended to cover such services as police, fire and transportation. In the case of school impact fees, they offset the costs of building new schools.

Pasco County Commissioners are currently working on a plan to reduce or eliminate many impact fees, including those meant to help fund new schools. The idea behind the move is to foster growth in the county and promote job creation. The county currently charges just under $5,000 in school impact fees for each new single family home. This money is used by the school district to help pay for new schools and cover debt service on bonds it’s taken out to cover previous construction.

County Commissioner Pat Mulieri said a determination of how much school impact fees might be cut hasn’t been made just yet.

“The amount depends on whether we eliminate school impact fees or reduce them to half the amount,” she wrote in an email. “We need to meet with the school board.”

That meeting won’t take place until the school board  meets Monday and has a chance to discuss this potential cut.

The school district is currently in a precarious spot when it comes to funding, said Summer Romagnoli, the district’s spokeswoman.

“We have concerns about any proposal that would cut another revenue source for the district,” she wrote in an email about impending budget cuts.

Romagnoli said the district is facing the loss of $60 million next year due to a combination of federal stimulus dollars going away and possible state funding cuts. The federal stimulus money represents $47 million of the loss.

Impact fees, Romagnoli said, are crucial for helping the school district pay its debt on schools that were built to meet the demands of recent growth.

She wrote, “$276.6 million was bonded specifically for the purpose of building 11 new schools necessitated by growth since the impact fee has been established. The annual debt service payment for these new schools is $16.8 million. The total capital cost for these 11 new schools is $301,284,186 (including land and construction).”

United School Employees of Pasco president Lynne Webb is not in favor of seeing the district lose impact fee funding.

“We can’t imagine losing any source of revenue right now,” said Webb. “I can’t see putting the careers and success of home builders over the careers and success of our students.”

Should the county eliminate impact fees, the school district would have to make some of that $16.8 million annual debt payment out of the general fund, Romagnoli said. This money is traditionally used to pay salaries and program expenses.

“This will lead to more lay-offs, salary cuts or program cuts in our operating budget,” she wrote.  

A joint meeting with county officials and representatives from Pasco’s incorporated cities will be scheduled after the school board holds it special session, which starts at 1:30 p.m. today.