LAKE COMO — The Lake Como Board of Education (BOE), at its meeting Tuesday night, unanimously voted to adopt its $4 million budget, with a 0% tax levy increase, for the 2025-2026 school year.
This year’s total revenue is set at $4,032,713. This is a $102,288 decrease from last year’s budget of $4,135,001, or 2.47%.
The tax levy this year is $3,450,745, the same as last year, for a zero increase. The estimated tax rate is 0.4615%, based on accessed values per parcel of land (1,015 parcels).
School Business Administrator/Board Secretary Michael Bardsley said, “We’re going up 0% this year. The reason why is because we had enough funding to cover all expenses, and basically it’s what we said we were going to do at that July meeting when we raised the tax levy. We did it just in case we needed the money, it showed out that we didn’t need the money this year, so it’s 0%.”
For the averaged assessed home valued at $653,147, there will be a $354 decrease in taxes compared to last year.
“The reason why there’s a decrease in the rate is because the assessed values from last year to this year went up,” Bardsley said.
The operating budget revenue is set at $3,791,588, a $110,598 decrease from last year’s $3,902,186.
State aid has increased more than $5,000 (2.25%) from last year, to this year’s total of $234,843.
Extraordinary aid, however, has decreased by $60,000 to this year’s total of $100,000. Bardsley noted that the reason for this decrease “is mainly because we don’t know what the state is going to do this following year – we’re going to have a new governor, we don’t know what’s going on with the federal side of funding with the Department of Ed(ucation)…everybody is telling us to decease our sum of our aids in federal funding for this upcoming year because we don’t truly know what it’s going to be yet.”
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