Sen. Millett's school budgeting bill wins unanimous committee support

AUGUSTA — A bill to add stability and predictability to the local school district budgeting process, sponsored by Democratic Sen. Rebecca Millett, won the unanimous support of the Legislature’s Education Committee on Wednesday.

The bill — LD 1475, “An Act to Facilitate the Use of State Education Subsidies” —now advances to the Senate and House for additional votes, but the full-throated support of the committee illustrates its broad, bipartisan support.

“I want to thank my colleagues on the Education Committee for supporting this commonsense budget fix for our schools,” said Sen. Millett, a member of the committee and its former Senate chairwoman. “This bill will let voters decide ahead of time what they’d like to do if the state sends more education funding than anticipated. That saves both time and money associated with costly additional budget referendum votes.”

LD 1475 would authorize regional school units to issue a warrant article to ask residents in advance what they would like to do if the state sends more education funding than the School Board anticipated.

School districts regularly craft budgets in the dark because, more often than not, their budgets must be ratified by local voters before a final state budget is passed. In those cases, local voters have to give an up or down vote before they know exactly how much state education money their schools will receive.

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