Harrisburg taxpayers will see their school taxes go up as the Harrisburg School board passed a new budget. A combination of pay cuts and board members getting along translated into getting a budget done.
9 votes is all it took and the motion was passed. The board putting the past behind them and moving forward. Chief Recovery Officer Gene Veno couldn’t be happier. It’s taken 7 months of negotiated pay cuts and premium increases to get to this moment. The budget cuts call for a 3% tax increase this upcoming fiscal year.
Recovery Officer Veno, “by 2016-2017 our plans do not call for any tax increase so as quickly as we can get to the recovery of this district, the better we can stabilize taxes in this community.”
School board member Brendan Murray credits the budget’s unanimous acceptance to transparency. “This year we had a great understanding of where the money was coming from and there was no surprise, 10 million at the end of the rainbow, so we knew that we had a budget we could count on and the numbers were going to be true and worry at the end of the day whether we would have all the funding.”