Westbrook voters will head back to the polls Tuesday to weigh in for a second time on a proposed fiscal year 2025 budget for the public school district.
This new iteration of the budget is about $700,000 less expensive than the previous version of the budget, coming in at a total of $51 million.
Accompanying the new proposal is a 13 percent school property tax rate hike, down slightly from the 15.7 percent increase included with the first iteration of the budget.
Under the FY25 budget up for consideration at the ballot box Tuesday, the town’s school-side mill rate would increase from $9.24 to $10.44 per $1,000 of property valuation.
The cost of the proposed FY25 budget represents just over an 8 percent increase compared to the FY24 budget. The original draft of the upcoming school budget would have been a 9.6 percent hike compared to the previous year.
According to the Portland Press Herald, the vote held in June was reportedly the first time that Westbrook voters have ever rejected a school budget at the ballot box.
The proposal was voted down by a margin of just 53 votes, or by about 2.78 percent. In total, 48.38 percent of Westbrook voters supported the school budget, while 51.16 percent opposed it.
[RELATED: Westbrook Voters Reject School Budget with Nearly 16 Percent Property Tax Hike]
School officials have explained that the majority of the district’s added expenditures for FY25 have come as a result of rising payroll and benefit costs for employees.
In a letter sent to Westbrook residents, Superintendent Peter Lancia said that the proposed budget was designed to meet the increasing needs of students in the district.
“The complexity of our student population continues to expand,” Superintendent Lancia said. “This includes students in special education programs with over 600 learners receiving services including a record number of students requiring outside of district placements in programs and facilities due to significant needs.”
“Additionally our population of students receiving multilingual services continues to grow, now to over 500 students, many of whom are newcomers and require targeted support in English as well as social services,” said Lancia.
During an early reading of the budget before the Town Council, Canal Elementary School teacher Megan Murrow told officials that the size of her classroom has grown from 13 to 19 over the past two years, and her students are in need of extra support.
According to Murrow, 21 percent of her students need multi-lingual support, 26 percent need individual education support, and 42 percent need social and emotional support.
This vote comes a week after Lewiston voters approved a $109.6 million school budget with a 9 percent school-side property tax hike after rejecting two previous proposals.
About 54 percent of those who turned out to the polls voted in support of the proposal, which is roughly equal to the proportion of voters who rejected the second draft of the budget in June.
With 1,230 votes in support of the proposal and 1,033 in opposition, the school district’s FY25 was ultimately approved with a margin of less than two hundred ballots.
Note: This story was updated to correct the reported percent increase in the school-side property tax rate associated with the FY25 budget under consideration in Westbrook.
<span class="dsq-postid" data-dsqidentifier="29358 https://www.themainewire.com/?p=29358">6 Comments
Gotta pay for the illegals
Just like So Portland
nothing to see here.. just the great replacement theory, fueling the great taking theory. or is the great taking financing the great replacement? just a couple puzzle peices to a big picture.
Wellcome to NY , Maine!
All these years living in a snow globe, while your Congressional delegation voted for policies that people from AWAY had to live with is coming home to roost.
Increased property taxes, crime, and general shittiness is now come home to roost
Suck on it, as Steve Bannon likes to say
There they go again,insane Maine Dems. How about kicking ALL illegals out of Maine & the USA which is what President Trump has promised to do! Then, stop ESL and have kids learn just English. Stop the ridiculous 1000 world language translations. Stop Stupidity 😡
Fascinating if you look at the numbers. For the Lewiston school budget that passed, mentioned at the end of the article, 1,230 voted in favor, 1,033 in opposition for the tax increase, so a total of 2,263 voters passed a school budget of $109,600,000 with a school-side property tax increase of 9%. Divide the budget by the number of people who voted (2,263) to get $48,431 per vote. How many kids are in the Lewiston school system to have only 2,263 voters showing up at the polls? And that is a hell of a lot of money per vote. Anyone know how many students enrolled in these schools and what the average income per adult is for Lewiston or how many are property owners? Seems like a lot of money to milk out of property taxes….
Maine: The New California.
Don’t go down this road. You’ll be funding your own dispossession. There is no going back. You do not want these people in Maine, and your ever decreasing number of descendants will curse you until they are eventually drowned in a sea of mud.
Get new politicians, do whatever it takes.