When is a budget not a budget?

When interim superintendent Wayne Dorr hands it to the school committee with multiple Prozac jokes and some substantial caveats.

The caveats stem largely from the fact Wiscasset is building its first solo school budget since it voted in November 2013 to leave Regional School Unit 12. The school committee, elected in early January, voted Dorr into his temp job on January 30.

That's several months later than he would usually start work on a budget, Dorr said February 25. The compressed time frame means information is still being gathered that will help shape the budget.

The $10 million first draft the committee received February 20 reflects none of the revenue that will offset the cost to property taxpayers, Dorr said. But it also doesn't include food service and adult education costs that will add to the budget total.

The budget total will rise or fall with each new piece of information that comes in, Dorr said. “So it’s almost irrelevant,” he said about the initial figure of $10,067,970. By February 25, the total had already shrunk by about $200,000, he said.

For the 2013-2014 budget year, Wiscasset’s last one inside the district, the town’s share is $6,135,292, district superintendent Howard Tuttle said. A total of $1,048,132 in state aid lowered Wiscasset’s bill to $5,087,160.

Dorr said he does not yet know how much the town will get in state aid for the next year.

The first budget draft should not be mistaken for a budget that would wind up being proposed to voters, Dorr said at the committee's February 20 meeting and in subsequent interviews.

“I don't want you to say, 'Oh my gosh, find my Prozac,' cause we're not there yet,” he told committee members.

“I'll continue to work at this thing to get it reduced.”

He'll be going through it line by line with school principals, he said.

“I want you to be very, very cautious about any assumptions you make as you read through it, because frankly there would be a number of assumptions that would be dead wrong,” Dorr told the panel.

Dorr said he was handing it out so that the committee could get familiar with it ahead of budget workshops with principals and other officials.

The biggest chunk, about $7.8 million for labor, doesn't account for some possible retirements, Dorr said. Some of those jobs may be able to go unfilled due to changes in grades' populations, he said.

The panel set its first budget workshop for 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 27, in the high school library. The workshop follows a 6 p.m. school committee meeting about proposed committee policies.

Payroll possibilities

How will Wiscasset's new school department do payroll and other business tasks? Dorr told the committee February 20 about a number of ideas he's been looking into.

One would be to set up and staff a business office; another would be to see if Regional School Unit 12 would do the work as a contractor; or the committee could look into the possibility of the town joining an “alternative organizational structure,” or AOS, see “Wiscasset school panel seeks meeting with AOS 98”; the other idea Dorr floated would be to hire SAD 51 in Cumberland.

SAD 51 already does business tasks for one other school system from a distance, Dorr said.

“They know what they're doing, They've been doing it,” Dorr said.

The committee agreed to seek a meeting with AOS 98's board, but took no other action on the other ideas Dorr floated.