Freeze on Current Year Spending (Region)

The February 6 article in the Amherst Bulletin (http://www.amherstbulletin.com/story/id/128091/ ) concerns the cut in state aid to the Town of Amherst, directly affecting the town’s revenue budget. Since the total budget must be balanced by the end of the year, Amherst and many other towns are faced with the same problem: find alternative sources of funding the expense budget, or implement cuts to the expense budget. In this case the Town of Amherst has identified a way to replace the state aid that was cut. This avoided the need for mid-year cuts to the expense budgets.

While the Amherst school budget was not cut, the total level of expenditures for a given fiscal year is fixed. Because known increased demands on the available budget, and because of uncertainty about possible additional cuts to state funding, a freeze was instituted on all non-essential expenses in the Amherst schools. As the year progresses and a clearer picture emerges for the rest of the year, it may be possible to ease the freeze for the Amherst elementary schools.

The Amherst-Pelham Regional School District is a separate legal entity, with its own budget. While the Region did not suffer cuts in state aid for the current fiscal year, the total level of expenditures for a given fiscal year is fixed by the budget approved by the member towns. Therefore if one category of expenditures unexpectedly increases, another category is decreased to account for that. While some amount of contingency planning is built into the budget, sometimes there is an out of the ordinary increase in costs that goes beyond what has been planned for. The purpose of the Region's current freeze on spending is to make up for certain unexpected expenses that have occurred this year. It is less likely that we will be able to ease the freeze for the Regional schools, but we will continue to monitor the situation.