By Emma Rausch
emma@thepaperofwabash.com
WABASH COUNTY, Ind. – The MSD of Wabash County Board of Education will be advertising its 2018 budget following a unanimous vote Tuesday night, Aug. 22.
The board began budget discussions in July. At it’s July 11 meeting, Chris Kuhn, MSD assistant superintendent of finance, advised the board that the budget’s funds will be advertised higher than what the Indiana Department of Local Government Finance will approve.
“So these are the estimated dollars of what we think we need to potentially spend for that fund,” he said at the July meeting, adding, “to make sure that we’re maximizing the amount of monies we need in some of those funds and it’s also to protect us because the amounts that we get … are determined by our assessed value, and we don’t know what our assessed value is going to be (when we adopt a budget). … If our assessed value comes back, let’s say, low, it could cause us to not get enough money that we need to actually operate on.”
At Tuesday night’s meeting, Kuhn informed the board that the 2018 budget will be advertised with an assessed value of $623,684,399. For 2017, the advertised assessed value was $652,215,425 while the actual was $733,746,352.
“Assessed value is what drives our tax rate and ultimately determines the amount of money that we’re going to collect in our tax levy,” Kuhn explained, later adding, “Because we can’t control what the AV is, when we estimate our assessed values, we estimate them low, which obviously shows a higher tax rate, but if our AV turns out to be higher then that obviously is going to make the tax rate much lower.
“We’ve had a good district of a low tax rate compared to other schools and part of that I think is because we only ask for what we need and we also have a pretty decent assessed value for a corporation.”
To get more of the story, check out the Aug. 30 edition of The Paper of Wabash County.