School District Could Be in $10.5M Budget Hole by 2015
Treasurer Rick Berdine said "no easy answers" to budget problems.
Lakewood City Schools Treasurer Rick Berdine’s presentation at Monday’s Board of Education meeting adopted a refrain of hope. “I hope I’m wrong,” he said, more than once. In his Five-Year Financial Forecast presented at Horace Mann Elementary School, Berdine said the district’s operating deficit will be $1.5 million this year, and will grow to about $10.5 million by 2015, thanks to lost revenues from property taxes, state and federal funding, and charter schools. “I cringed putting these numbers up here,” Berdine said. The calculations cannot, by law, include projections for future levies, and did not make any proposed cuts to the $70 million budget. The calamitous economy has dealt a serious blow to the district’s coffers. In 2008, the …
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