The Great Falls Public Schools board budget committee met March 18 and unanimously voted to recommend that the district forgo a levy this year.

The full board will consider that recommendation and make a final decision during their March 24 meeting.

The committee includes Mark Finnicum, Paige Turoski and Bill Bronson.

The district is projecting a nearly $2.5 million shortfall for the upcoming budget year, which begins July 1.

That’s a projected shortfall the district has been discussing since last summer.

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Brian Patrick, GFPS’ business operations manager, is recommending a mix of remaining COVID relief funds, reserves and some potential budget reductions to balance the budget.

District officials said they’ll likely need to revisit the district’s financial position in the fall and consider whether to pursue a levy and begin a public awareness campaign, which is handled through Kids Education Yes, a political action group that supports GFPS.

Patrick said the trend is continuing that revenues aren’t keeping up with expenses and inflation.

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This year, there are still many unknown factors so Patrick said it’s difficult to make projections for the upcoming budget this early.

The district is currently in negotiations with the teachers union so those numbers are not yet set, and other unions will go into negotiations later this spring and non-union employee raises will be calculated over the summer.

Patrick said as a general rule of thumb is that for every one percent salary increase across employee groups equates to about $700,000.

Patrick said the district can get by another year without a levy, but don’t want to eat up their reserves and risk larger cuts in the near future.

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The district is also awaiting the outcome of decisions at the Legislature to determine the impact to the school funding programs, including one that would generally revise school funding formulas.

Finnicum, whose term ends this year and he is not seeking re-election in May, said that people have asked him if local entities can coordinate when they’re asking for levies, such as the city and county.

Superintendent Heather Hoyer said she and GFPS administrators have those conversations and had met with some city officials late last year to get a sense of their plans.

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Bronson, board budget committee member, said that he also works with the Great Falls Fire Foundation and they met with a city commissioner and mayor last year when they said if they did another public safety levy it would be in 2026.

City Commissioner Joe McKenney has said publicly in multiple meetings that he thought the earliest the city would try for another public safety levy would be 2026 after their November 2023 attempt failed.

Patrick said another unknown factor is federal funding and programs and how those funds will be distributed.

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Lance Boyd, assistant superintendent, said there were two federal entitlement programs, Title 1 and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, that will flow through the state, but all other federal programs are up in the air based on changes at the federal level and they have “no idea” how that will shake out.

Patrick reminded the committee that it has options for funding through a general operations levy, but there are also safety, technology and building reserve levies.

He said Bozeman is doing a building reserve levy now, but that requires a detailed capital plan.

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Safety levies don’t tend to fare well, he said.

The district also has the option to run combinations of those levies but it’s a tough sell to do too many, Patrick said.

Bronson said that after the district’s community consensus building process, they know that if needed, there are areas they can trim the budget, which he said they could likely do anyway to prepare for a continued lack of resources.

Finnicum said he didn’t know if it was possible, but could the district go for a levy annually, keeping the numbers smaller rather than a larger ask as needed.

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He said many voters think the district asks for a levy every year, but that’s not the case.

GFPS last ran a levy request on the ballot in 2020 that was for $1.75 million in the elementary district.

Before that an elementary levy failed in 2018 and a technology levy failed in 2017.

Voters approved the $98 million facility bond in 2016 and a $1.6 million operational levy was approved in 2014.

Patrick said the tradition at GFPS has been to not ask for levies until “we’re behind the 8-ball” and have significant needs and “that’s not the best position to be in.”

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Finnicum said that some taxpayers might prefer the smaller levy requests more frequently rather than larger requests.

Patrick said they’d work with KEY! to consider asking that question in their community survey.

The maximum levy about the district could have asked for in the last budget year was $1.8 million district wide and while there’s a number of unknown factors, Patrick said he’d expect that to be a close figure to this year’s max.

Under current law, operational levies approved by voters remain in perpetuity, but they are set dollar amounts versus mills that adjust as mill values vary annually.