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Vigo County Oversight BoardJan 29, 2026

About this transcript

Automatic transcription, not the official record. This is what speech recognition heard at the meeting; it mis-hears names and numbers, and no editor has checked it. The clerk's minutes are the official record. Every line links to the moment in the recording — check anything that matters.

Voices were separated automatically and named from the meeting's speaker roster where the evidence supported it. An unnamed voice shows as Speaker 12 — a machine label, not a person's name.

Meeting
Vigo County Oversight Board · Jan 29, 2026
Length
1:16:48
Lines
177
Transcribed by
mlx-community/whisper-large-v3-turbo
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  1. 0:00:00 — open the recording at 0 secondsSpeaker 1 Thank you.

  2. 0:00:09 — open the recording at 9 secondsSpeaker 2 (chair) Good morning. First up on the agenda, we have minutes from the last meeting, which is, I believe, January 15th.

  3. 0:00:25 — open the recording at 25 secondsSpeaker 5 I'll make a motion to approve minutes.

  4. 0:00:27 — open the recording at 27 secondsSpeaker 9 (chair) Thank you, Carrie.

  5. 0:00:30 — open the recording at 30 secondsSpeaker 10 (chair) Second. Thank you, Mark. All those in favor say aye. All right. Dr. Hemsall.

  6. 0:00:46 — open the recording at 46 secondsChristopher A. Himsel (superintendent) Thank you all. Appreciate the opportunity to provide additional information as we continue our work.

  7. 0:00:52 — open the recording at 52 secondsChristopher A. Himsel (superintendent) First of all, thank you to those of you. I know at least one of you were out there shoveling yesterday. There may have been more of you. So thank you to everyone who did that. We actually cleared miles of sidewalks yesterday. Thank you to everyone in the community who did that. Today, we wanted to just give you some basics of how school finance work. We understand that if you're not a school person, some of this doesn't make sense, but it's the rules that we live under. Donna Wilson, our chief financial officer, and I could do this talk,

  8. 0:01:25 — open the recording at 1 minute 25 secondsChristopher A. Himsel (superintendent) and we thought it was better for you to hear from the people who we learn from. We can answer questions that are specific to Vigo County if those come up through the conversation. But with us today, we have Chad Blacklock from Stiefel, and we also have Kristen McClellan, who serves as bond counsel for Ice Miller. they provide legal services for county city libraries and schools throughout in terms of bonding and making sure that we follow all the federal and state statutes that accompany that between the two of them they should be able to answer most of your questions again if you have

  9. 0:02:06 — open the recording at 2 minutes 6 secondsChristopher A. Himsel (superintendent) very specific questions about vigo county donna wilson and i are here and can try to fill in but we thought an overview and hearing it from the people who donna and i would go and listen to to learn about would be the best way to do this as you will find out from this there have been many many changes that have occurred I began working in central and district office administrative roles back in 1999 I've been serving with superintendent since 2008 and I can tell you that the number of changes that have happened are really difficult to keep up with

  10. 0:02:38 — open the recording at 2 minutes 38 secondsChristopher A. Himsel (superintendent) and even though there is a claim that it is to simplify things it is actually getting more and more complex as you will hear from Chad and getting more difficult which is why we rely on the expertise that they provide to make sure that we are doing things correctly we are following the state and federal statute so with that I'm going to introduce Chad and he's going to help get us started and Kristen will be here to answer questions from a legal perspective as he goes

  11. 0:03:04 — open the recording at 3 minutes 4 secondsSpeaker 20 along thank you good morning everybody thank you for having us here today so before I get started just give you a little background about myself I always feel like when I get up and speak about

  12. 0:03:19 — open the recording at 3 minutes 19 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) school finance people are like what what what gives this guy the authority to teach us about school finance so this is my 18th year in public school finance I served for about 10 years in a school CFO role I was with Vincennes Community Schools just obviously south of here for a couple years as their director of finance and then I was about 10 years in Franklin Township Schools in Marion County, a school district about the size of Ego County Schools. And then I started with Stiefel about eight years ago now. They are an investment banking firm, but they have a public finance division,

  13. 0:03:59 — open the recording at 3 minutes 59 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) and that's the division that I work in. I work with only Indiana K-12 public schools. We work with about 130 out of the 290 public schools in the state. everything on from the capital side capital planning school finance long-range planning budgeting anything really on the financial or operational side of running a school district so I've been doing that for quite a while so what I'm going to go through today like Dr. Hemslel said I'm just going to kind of give you the basics of school finance and and we do a lot of these

  14. 0:04:33 — open the recording at 4 minutes 33 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) presentations for school boards and different organizations across the state like Dr. Hemslel said it's kind of a unique beast school finance not that it's rocket science but it's got a lot of moving pieces and it's very different than if you own a private business and trying to run it it's very different than that so I'm going to go over on this first slide just to kind of give a brief overview of some of the changes that public schools have faced over the last couple years and you know that has caused running the school financially to be just a little more complex than than it used to be.

  15. 0:05:10 — open the recording at 5 minutes 10 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) And so, you know, one of the changes that I think, which we're gonna talk quite a bit today, is there's a lot of new legislative changes that have come out over the last five or six years that have impacted schools financially and operationally in a couple different ways. Revenue streams are not as large as they used to be coming into a public school, all while on the expense side of running our homes a school district or a private business inflationary costs have caused expenses to skyrocket while the revenue hasn't kept pace with the expenses over the last five or six years

  16. 0:05:49 — open the recording at 5 minutes 49 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) that's caused a lot of financial differences in a school district versus the way that we used to run them all schools every school district that i work with they are trying to keep pace with what i'll call fair and competitive wages and benefits that's our largest expense on the up on the expense side of a school district and so everybody's trying to make sure their teacher custodian bus driver everybody's pay is fair and competitive so that we can attract and retain qualified talent you know to to help our kids and help teach our kids every day in our school district and so that

  17. 0:06:28 — open the recording at 6 minutes 28 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) also has caused increases on the expense side this is probably the the the biggie that i see really impacting schools now and is going to continue to impact our public schools are the fact that um you know school our our kids today have a choice in what school they can go to um when i went to monrovia high school i didn't have a choice other than going to monrovia high school when I graduated you know my parents weren't asking me every summer hey Chad what school would you like to attend this summer would you like to go to a virtual school would you like

  18. 0:07:03 — open the recording at 7 minutes 3 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) to try a charter school would you like to try this would there was no choice and but today we have choices and our parents our families are having those kind of conversations now and so school public school districts are trying to figure out how do we navigate this and those are new conversations that are happening with school boards and school administration that that we just weren't having before. I'm not saying it's a good or a bad thing. I'm just saying it's a we have to figure out how to navigate that as running a public school and in our communities as well. What that looks like?

  19. 0:07:37 — open the recording at 7 minutes 37 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) I've already really talked about inflation, you know, really on the inflation side. Other than salaries and benefits, schools are really seeing a lot of increases in things. Like one thing we don't think about is property and casualty insurance, how we insure our buildings. A lot of those premiums have tripled over the last three or four years, mainly because the price to the price tag to replace of elementary building today is a lot more than it used to be. Roofs are more expensive. So costs have gone up in premiums to fund those.

  20. 0:08:09 — open the recording at 8 minutes 9 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) And those are significant dollars on the opera in our operations fund that we're going to talk about. The cost of construction has doubled or tripled. utilities have gone up a school bus that used to cost 120 now cost 230 000 so those things are all adding to the uh the financial pressures with a school district a lot of schools now um that you know have not wanted to do operating reference in the past a lot of schools are now entertaining the thought about doing operating referendums because it is a tool in the toolbox to try to

  21. 0:08:43 — open the recording at 8 minutes 43 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) keep up with with some of the pressures okay all right so um like i said i'm just going to kind of go over the basics please ask questions um make this kind of informal i want to make sure that you guys leave here today just understanding a little bit more about how the the funding mechanisms work the funds that we talk about the different buckets that we have to put money into i want you to just understand that basics a little bit more so that will help in your decision making moving forward so public school districts in indiana really have two main sources of revenue

  22. 0:09:19 — open the recording at 9 minutes 19 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) and i just want to briefly talk about those the first source of revenue is what i'm going to refer to as state funding and the state funding that we receive is based on a student head count so for every student that attends a public school we get dollars from the state to fund those and And there are some different buckets of dollars that we get, and I'm going to talk about those in just a second. What those different qualifications are to get dollars into our school district. So it's really important. We count students for dollars a couple different times a year.

  23. 0:09:57 — open the recording at 9 minutes 57 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) There are several different counts that we take. The two big counts that we take are in February. So coming up here in a couple weeks, Vigo County Schools is going to take a head count, and that's going to get them a very large portion of their funding for January through June 30th of this year. Then they're going to take another headcount in October, and that's going to get them a large chunk of their funding for July through December of this year. So I think it's critical to understand Vigo County Schools, their funding that is coming in, a large chunk of it, is adjusted every six months.

  24. 0:10:31 — open the recording at 10 minutes 31 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) So if we grow or lose kids every six months, we grow or lose money for every one of those kids every six months. And so it's always changing every six month period. OK, the majority of those dollars that are coming into the school district are earmarked by the state to say those need to fund instructional expenditures. So just for example, I'm going to say revenue coming in from the state can't make a debt payment. It's not supposed to buy a school bus. It goes directly into what I'm going to call the education fund. And I'm going to get into that a little deeper here in a second.

  25. 0:11:14 — open the recording at 11 minutes 14 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) The other large source of revenue that comes into a school district is property tax and property tax comes into a public school in two forms. We bring the property tax in and schools are allowed to use that for two things to repay debt. So if a school district has outstanding mortgage payments, I will call them schools for the most part, repay their debt twice a year in June and December. They make semi annual debt payments. We bring our property tax in. We get a June and a December property tax draw and they make their debt payments.

  26. 0:11:50 — open the recording at 11 minutes 50 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) other form of property tax that we bring in goes into our operational fund and that is used to fund the operational side of the school district and so when i refer to the operational side of the school district i'm talking about things like our transportation program paying our custodians maintenance expenses our central office staff utilities property and casualty insurance if you owned a private business all the things that you would kind of think about as fixed cost overhead cost are really paid for out of the operational fund and then all of our what i'll say instructional

  27. 0:12:26 — open the recording at 12 minutes 26 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) costs are paid for out of what i call the education fund again and as i go through this i'll define those a little bit more because i think that's one of the things that people don't really understand about school finance the revenue has to be used for certain earmarked expenses coming into a school district okay okay so we're going to spend some some time on this slide so this slide you guys have all heard and probably know that in school districts we use what we call fund accounting and all fund accounting simply means is yes vigo county schools might have a checking or a savings

  28. 0:13:05 — open the recording at 13 minutes 5 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) or a securities account that they're investing dollars in but the state of indiana says that we have to receipt certain revenue into what i'll call a fund a lot of times it's referred to as a bucket and every school has to follow the same fund accounting structure okay and so certain re all the revenue comes in it has to go into a certain bucket or a certain account and then we can only pay for certain things out of that bucket and if it doesn't meet our state board of accounts or our state guidelines we can't pay for it out of that particular bucket okay so i want to make

  29. 0:13:41 — open the recording at 13 minutes 41 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) sure that you guys really kind of understand these funds or these buckets and what can come in and out of this so i'm going to start here in the blue box i'm referring to that as the instructional fund so those dollars that i talked about on the previous slide that come in from the state must be receded into the education fund and i refer to that as instructional because this is where we pay for our teachers salaries and benefits our principal salary and benefits our instructional assistants our um you know our speech pathologist all of these type of people that i always like to

  30. 0:14:20 — open the recording at 14 minutes 20 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) say they're tied to an individual school building and they're instructing kids in some nature throughout the day they are paid for their salaries and benefits and any supplies or anything like that are paid for solely out of the instructional bucket which we call the education fund the state of indian and calls that the education fund so you can see i have there the revenue that comes in is that state tuition support that's our money that we get from the state for every kid there's some other miscellaneous revenue like for example we get a summer school grant that gets receded

  31. 0:14:54 — open the recording at 14 minutes 54 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) into that fund there's some some small amounts but the money that we get from the state is 99 of the revenue that goes into this fund okay and we pay for those instructional costs the next fund to the right the operations fund that you see in green no state dollars go directly into the operations fund it's property tax dollars that go into that fund and again what we pay for are those operational expenses that i mentioned before capital equipment insurance central office transportation we buy you can buy buses we buy our bus fuel all those types of things are paid

  32. 0:15:36 — open the recording at 15 minutes 36 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) for out of the operations fund they cannot be paid for out of the education fund they have to be paid for out of the operations fund okay property tax driven one little seed that i want to plant the property tax and i'm going to get into this in greater detail that comes into the operations fund is capped and every school district has a unique cap that is unique to their school district so bego county schools has an amount of property tax that is capped that comes into the operations fund and why that's important is because when i talk about things like all these inflationary costs

  33. 0:16:16 — open the recording at 16 minutes 16 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) going up in the operations fund they can't just increase the revenue coming into the operations fund because it has a cap to it okay so you have to kind of live within the means in that particular fund okay then we move to the right in the gray is the debt fund the debt fund is kind of unique 100 well 99 property tax driven our property and i say 99 our prop our two property tax funds or i I guess for Vigo County Schools are three because of the referendum fund. We also get commercial vehicle excise tax. We get licensed excise tax. We get some other small taxes.

  34. 0:16:53 — open the recording at 16 minutes 53 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) But again, the property tax is like 99% of the revenue into those funds. Back to the debt fund. The debt fund can only repay debt. So we levy the property taxpayer for the payments that we have that we have to repay every year. the amount of property tax that we ask for the taxpayers to pay is capped by the payments we can't ask for really any more above the payments Beagle County Schools brings those dollars in they repay their June and December payments and we move on they might end the year with a little

  35. 0:17:27 — open the recording at 17 minutes 27 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) bit of cash left in the debt fund but they can't do anything with it it has to stay in the debt service fund it can't be transferred to another fund it really can't be used for anything else other than to repay debt okay the next fund to the right the operating referendum fund not every school has an operating referendum you guys do have an operating referendum not to be confused with the operations fund that gets a little confusing there are three different types of referendums in the state of indiana the operating referendum fund is one of those i think we title

  36. 0:18:02 — open the recording at 18 minutes 2 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) lit operating referendum because for the most part your operating referendum legally can the expenses that can come out of that fund are really anything that you pay for out of the education or the operations fund so we can pay teachers salaries and benefits we can fund transportation we can pay for custodians we can do all of these things not that vigo county schools is necessarily paying for all of those maybe some of those every school uses their operating referendum a little differently but those are the things that we are allowed we don't make debt payments out of the

  37. 0:18:37 — open the recording at 18 minutes 37 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) operating referendum fund and we don't really buy things capital in nature out of the operating referendum fund it's usually salaries and benefits and things like that okay property tax that is property tax driven again i'll get into it does have a cap to it the amount of property tax that we bring into that fund okay down in uh kind of that salmon colored the rainy day fund i kind of put it over to the side because it's a unique kind of animal in the fact that the only revenue that comes into the rainy day fund are transfers from one of the other funds so let's say a school

  38. 0:19:13 — open the recording at 19 minutes 13 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) district gets to the end of the budget year and they have a little extra cash they've funded their budget and they had a budget surplus potentially that a little extra cash and they wanted to transfer that to the rainy day fund they could do that there's no revenue source that is continuously feeding into like property tax or state money that goes into the rainy day fund it's truly the the intent of the rainy day fund is truly to kind of be a savings account to to help school districts or governmental entities um you know if revenue was short or you know a school

  39. 0:19:46 — open the recording at 19 minutes 46 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) district found a had a really large enrollment decrease they might have a little extra money in reserves to help them kind of weather those storms just like we would have a savings account in our personal finances as far as things that you can pay for out of the rainy day fund that is governed by a board resolution that is signed by the school board when the rainy day fund is established and so that's kind of how you can spend dollars from the rainy day fund but again I think the thing to remember about that fund is there's no continuous source of revenue going into that funding

  40. 0:20:19 — open the recording at 20 minutes 19 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) I do have a little note down here in the left side, and this is something that was different starting in 2019 because this fund structure that you see was something new in 2019. This was a new legislative bill that came out that created this fund structure. Instead of the operations fund, we used to have three separate funds called capital projects, school bus replacement, and transportation. And those funds could only be used for, like the transportation fund. We could only fund transportation in 2019. Our legislators took all those three funds and put them into one really kind of bucket.

  41. 0:20:55 — open the recording at 20 minutes 55 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) And we're calling that the operations fund. Well, when they did that. There were some expenditures that we used to pay for out of what was called the general fund, which is now called the education fund, essentially. So when they made the operations fund, they took the general fund away and they created the education fund. general fund was state support no property tax that kind of thing but when they did that there were some expenses that school districts were allowed to pay for out of the general fund that

  42. 0:21:27 — open the recording at 21 minutes 27 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) our legislator said i don't want we don't want schools paying for those out of the education fund anymore you need to move those over to the operations fund well there wasn't really a new source of revenue when we moved the expenses over they then said you can also start to move over some of the state support revenue that comes into the education fund you can move that over to the operations fund so for example if there were two million dollars of expenses that we used to pay for out of the general fund that we had to move over to the operations fund then maybe the

  43. 0:22:01 — open the recording at 22 minutes 1 secondChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) school district would say we've got to transfer two million dollars of revenue over to so the state support is directly receded into the education fund but the school districts are allowed to transfer a certain portion of that to the operations fund but again it has a cap they can't transfer just whatever they want to transfer the cap is up to 15 percent of the state tuition support that came into that fund for the year that's the cap that they can transfer over to the operations

  44. 0:22:33 — open the recording at 22 minutes 33 secondsSpeaker 4 fund and they're not supposed to exceed that cap okay hey chad yes does the 15 cap that you can

  45. 0:22:41 — open the recording at 22 minutes 41 secondsCarrie (board member) transfer does that cover the expenses that were transferred from the education fund to the

  46. 0:22:46 — open the recording at 22 minutes 46 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) operations fund that's a great question so i can remember when this first came into play and i was i was a cfo then and so all schools were trying to calculate well what is that cost if it's two million dollars then i'm going to transfer two million dollars over and i'm going to say for the first couple of years that's probably what we were all doing we were trying to say well this is what the expenses were so we're going to transfer the same amount of revenue over to cover that i think in theory that was a good concept but what has happened over the years

  47. 0:23:27 — open the recording at 23 minutes 27 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) that whole idea has now kind of dissipated and the the operational fund expenses that we moved over they're just now operational fund expenses and now what has really started to happen is most schools are trying to keep as much as many dollars as they can in the education fund to fund our instructional expenses so i'm going to venture to say if you did that study on all 290 schools i'm going to say the money they are transferring over now probably isn't covering all of those expenses like they were would be my guess because there's been so much pressure on trying to get teacher

  48. 0:24:07 — open the recording at 24 minutes 7 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) pay up health insurance costs most schools have tried to start leaving more and more revenue in the education fund to keep it to keep it balanced that's a great question though I see

  49. 0:24:19 — open the recording at 24 minutes 19 secondsSpeaker 43 some heads nodding I'm sure you're probably on track with that thank you I have a question on

  50. 0:24:26 — open the recording at 24 minutes 26 secondsSpeaker 45 rainy day fund um so you put obviously for expenses there has to be a board resolution but

  51. 0:24:32 — open the recording at 24 minutes 32 secondsSpeaker 50 do the dollars transferred in become unrestricted once they're in there yeah great question um they

  52. 0:24:39 — open the recording at 24 minutes 39 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) are really only restricted to whatever the school corporation's board resolution says that they can spend them on and i'm gonna and i again i'm not familiar with vigo county's resolution but I'm going to say some schools that I work with their resolution might say we can pay for anything except salaries and benefits like they may not want to pay for salaries and benefits because that's kind of an ongoing cost when there's not an ongoing source of revenue might be something I've had some school board resolutions to say we can pay for only school buses maybe they just want

  53. 0:25:12 — open the recording at 25 minutes 12 secondsSpeaker 52 (unknown (contaminated label)) to be able to buy some school buses so it's really up to the board resolution and whatever it says that they can pay for out of the function yes

  54. 0:25:29 — open the recording at 25 minutes 29 secondsSpeaker 55 but we do not have not had an adopted budget in that fund and we have said

  55. 0:25:36 — open the recording at 25 minutes 36 secondsSpeaker 57 (staff (district administration -- superintendent or CFO, unresolved)) that those monies aside in our rainy day fund

  56. 0:25:40 — open the recording at 25 minutes 40 secondsSpeaker 59 (staff (district administration -- superintendent or CFO, unresolved)) we've taken the attitude that if we're going to expend money from there we want to have a special line item in the board meeting so that the community can see that we're doing it and the board take action on it therefore we've not included it in our budget we will come to the board with a special resolution appropriation resolution so that we're being transparent with the community that we're going to spend money from that account and be transparent

  57. 0:26:06 — open the recording at 26 minutes 6 secondsSpeaker 63 (staff (district administration -- superintendent or CFO, unresolved)) about what it is going to be spent the last transfer we did make into our education or our rainy day fund was during the period when we had to do a certain funds during

  58. 0:26:17 — open the recording at 26 minutes 17 secondsSpeaker 66 and that fund balance has stayed stagnant and invested and just we've just been receiving

  59. 0:26:21 — open the recording at 26 minutes 21 secondsSpeaker 67 interest into it so it's only recently based on interest what is that balance donna roughly it's

  60. 0:26:29 — open the recording at 26 minutes 29 secondsSpeaker 68 i think around 13 13 and a half million thanks i'd have to go back and look i didn't bring the

  61. 0:26:35 — open the recording at 26 minutes 35 secondsSpeaker 72 financial statement i have my budgets but it's approximately eight percent of expenditures

  62. 0:26:42 — open the recording at 26 minutes 42 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) So it sounds like they're so Vigo County Schools would be taking an extra step, you know, in in transparency, like Donna said, that if they're having the board specifically approve any type of extra expenditure like that, instead of putting into the regular budget, that would just be an extra transparency step that they would be taking to make sure that they're transparent and all that. And I would say how they're using their rainy day fund. Most of my schools that I work with are doing kind of the same thing. They're kind of putting that money there.

  63. 0:27:16 — open the recording at 27 minutes 16 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) A lot of schools haven't been able to add a bunch to it over the last four or five years, but they're just kind of leaving it there as kind of a just in case or something that we need to do down the road.

  64. 0:27:26 — open the recording at 27 minutes 26 secondsSpeaker 52 (unknown (contaminated label)) Yep. Good questions. Other questions about any of that? It's a lot of info.

  65. 0:27:35 — open the recording at 27 minutes 35 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) I think there's anything that I really missed there. I'm going to get into a little deeper on the property tax side here in a second into our property tax funds. OK, OK. A lot of numbers here. I just kind of put this here. I just wanted to just spend a couple of minutes digging down a little deeper into that state tuition support. And so all you're really looking at here, and it's probably small for you to see. There are two really two main types. when we talk about the dollars that come into that education fund from the state there's about five or

  66. 0:28:10 — open the recording at 28 minutes 10 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) six separate grants that are all kind of lumped in so donna would get one one ach transfer on a monthly basis from the department of ed and that's going to be her total dollars coming into the education fund to fund expenses in there but then she's got a breakdown of these kind of individual grants that school districts receive that make up the big lump sum the largest grant when i say largest is from a revenue source is what you kind of see across the top and we call that the foundation funding all i'm showing you here is that going back to fiscal year 22 every kid in

  67. 0:28:48 — open the recording at 28 minutes 48 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) the state of indiana that attended a public school they were worth five thousand nine hundred and 95 that number that you see across the top our legislators establish the dollars that come into the school district from a from a state standpoint established by our legislators through something called the tuition support formula it's a 16 literally a 16 page calculation that goes through every one of these grants and at the end spits out a dollar amount that vigo county schools receives per kid our legislators establish these dollar amounts when they meet in the odd numbered years

  68. 0:29:32 — open the recording at 29 minutes 32 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) so it's a budget year so when they meet when they met in 2025 they established the per student funding for fiscal year 26 and fiscal year 27. so we know our per student funding for the next two fiscal years but remember schools operate on a calendar year we all our budgets are january through december um so but are we get dollars on a fiscal year basis so all i'm simply giving you a little history here every kid from a foundation standpoint was worth five thousand nine hundred ninety five dollars in fiscal year 22. it went up four percent in 23 to 6 235 and you can just kind

  69. 0:30:17 — open the recording at 30 minutes 17 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) of track that to the right so when they met in 2025 they set 26 and 27 which i have in orange so in 26 fiscal year 26 through june 30th of 26 every kid is worth 6 967 and that was a 4.3 percent increase over 25 but then in 27 it goes it goes up only one and a half percent to 7071. so when i start to see those numbers i start to then think about the expense side of a school district and i start to think about teacher pay raises instructional assistance health insurance costs going up and i start to look at those increases to say will those fund the increases that i need

  70. 0:31:00 — open the recording at 31 minutesChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) to pay to keep up with to have a fair and competitive pay the other thing that i think is important to understand is that these are per student amounts as of 2025 approximately 68 percent of indiana public schools are declining in enrollment so when i look at those dollar amounts and i see i'm getting a 4.3 percent increase if i'm a superintendent or a cfo or a school board member that's per kid but if my enrollment is declining two or three percent i'm not getting four point three percent new revenue and so i think that's really important to understand

  71. 0:31:44 — open the recording at 31 minutes 44 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) because so many school districts in indiana are declining in enrollment so next year when we get to fiscal year 27 and you see only a 1.5 percent increase there's going to be a break-even point right there's going to be a break-even point where we reduce so many kids down that now we're no new revenue or declining in revenue and so that's one of the complexities that is started that is happening with school districts and managing it financially because we're losing enrollment and then the dollars coming in per kid aren't necessarily high enough to fund increasing expenses okay

  72. 0:32:26 — open the recording at 32 minutes 26 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) the next biggest grant that comes in on top of the foundation is called the complexity grant and so the idea of the complexity grant is that vigo county schools like every other school in the state they get a little extra dollars for any for any students of complexity which means of poverty that they might be have in their school district so schools get a little extra dollars to fund the complexity or the kids of poverty that are in their school district those kind of programs to give those kiddos a little extra support okay so those two grants

  73. 0:33:02 — open the recording at 33 minutes 2 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) that come into the education fund are the vast majority of that state support schools also get a little extra money for special ed students so we've got a report that we submit every year our special ed students we get a little extra dollars on top of these for a special needs student we get a little extra and very small extra dollars for things like an honor so if we graduate a kid from our our high schools with an honors diploma we get a little bit of extra money for them to fund like ap programs and some of those programs that those kids took

  74. 0:33:35 — open the recording at 33 minutes 35 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) we get a little extra money for our career tech ed courses and we are also getting a little bit of extra money if we have any uh english learners so if you had english as a second language learners coming into our school district get a little extra money for them those are the separate grants that come into um into our education fund one change that i think that is worth noting that i've got some outlines down here that i again just the schools are trying to navigate um is that back in 2023 a new bill came out that said school indiana public schools can no longer charge

  75. Highlight drawn from this moment: State budget ends a $155-per-student textbook grant; district cites grant loss and enrollment decline in a $1.5 million annual shortfall

    0:34:11 — open the recording at 34 minutes 11 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) parents for textbooks so we were one of few states in in the in the country that still charged for textbooks so we got rid of being able to charge a parent that couple hundred dollars a year for textbooks for their students then school districts for in 2024 and 2025 received a grant from the state to kind of help fund the textbooks because textbooks cost, especially now that a lot of kids have Chromebooks and different things like that, textbook costs are really, really high. And so we were getting about $155 for every kid for 2324 to help fund some of these textbook costs.

  76. Highlight drawn from this moment: State budget ends a $155-per-student textbook grant; district cites grant loss and enrollment decline in a $1.5 million annual shortfall

    0:34:57 — open the recording at 34 minutes 57 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) In 2025, when our new budget was passed, that grant was removed so the $155 per kid the schools were getting in 23 and 24 starting in 25 was gone and if you take $155 times the amount of kids that Vigo County Schools has significant dollars millions and so that was taken away but there was not really a revenue source given on the back end to help fund that. So the school so our school districts have taken on an additional million dollar, a couple million dollar a year expense that's really just kind of now funded out of the state support that we're getting for every kid.

  77. 0:35:41 — open the recording at 35 minutes 41 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) We no longer have this separate grant coming in.

  78. Highlight drawn from this moment: State budget ends a $155-per-student textbook grant; district cites grant loss and enrollment decline in a $1.5 million annual shortfall

    0:35:45 — open the recording at 35 minutes 45 secondsSpeaker 59 (staff (district administration -- superintendent or CFO, unresolved)) To clarify for our position, hopefully, and Chad, I say this wrong. Please jump in and correct. A lot of that 4.3% increase in UC was because they rolled the grant wasn't necessarily new revenue that was part of the grant into that so when we removed the part we're supposed to devote to the books our net was a

  79. 0:36:10 — open the recording at 36 minutes 10 secondsSpeaker 83 1.5 million dollar loss when you accompanied these enrollment losses

  80. 0:36:18 — open the recording at 36 minutes 18 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) yeah no thank you dr hemsel and i've got kind of down here in yellow i do kind of have that highlighted so to his point the 6,967 we were getting in fiscal year 26 this says 4.3 percent if i back 155 dollars out of the 6,967 that takes the 4.3 percent increase down to only a two percent increase okay and then we are getting a little less funding in the complexity side so you can see that in fiscal year 26 i have that negative 0.6 in the complexity grant row if i then add in the fact that complexity went down a little bit that actually takes our 4.3 percent increase down to

  81. 0:37:06 — open the recording at 37 minutes 6 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) what i have in yellow in 26 only a one percent increase per student and then if you are losing kids on top of that that's probably why we're seeing a net our revenue is now declining fiscal year 27 same simple math if I take the 7071 back out the 155 dollars we were getting per kid now we're actually getting negative point three percent revenue in 2026 or 2027 per kid so then again if you're losing kids that's going to take your revenue down even a little bit farther so this was some significant dollars that expense hasn't gone away so how I see it is it's an

  82. 0:37:49 — open the recording at 37 minutes 49 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) expense there that we still have to pay for. It's getting paid for now out of the education fund. So we schools now have to fund all textbook curricular related expenses out of the education fund. And like Dr. Hemsall said, you're essentially funding it with our per student money that we're getting now. OK.

  83. 0:38:09 — open the recording at 38 minutes 9 secondsSpeaker 87 Any other questions about that?

  84. 0:38:14 — open the recording at 38 minutes 14 secondsSpeaker 89 OK.

  85. 0:38:15 — open the recording at 38 minutes 15 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) let's switch over to the property tax side so everything that I talked about before state support education fund instructional expenditures yes we can transfer a cap of 15% of that revenue over to the operations fund so now let's switch to property tax operating referendum operations fund and debt fund and each one of these work very differently okay so I'm gonna start first over on the left with the debt fund so the debt fund is kind of what i call um a needs-based fund kristen at ice miller probably doesn't like it when i say that but i refer to it as a needs

  86. 0:38:55 — open the recording at 38 minutes 55 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) based fund and i i just do that to kind of emphasize the fact of how this fund works meaning that um the the the revenue the property tax in that fund is really capped in the state of indiana by the levy that a school district would want to levy its taxpayers to repay the debt it's it's it's driven by the amount of the annual debt payments okay um and so when when donna does our budget every year she's got a set of debt payments she goes through it kicks out a calculation that this is how much i need in property tax to repay those payments very simple kind of kind of

  87. 0:39:37 — open the recording at 39 minutes 37 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) calculation and how that fund works i think it's probably the simplest of of the three funds okay when we get over to the operations fund it works much differently it has a cap and so in 2019 when the operations fund was established we took that bus replacement capital projects transportation funds and we our our state our state took it all put it all into one bucket and that spit out a maximum property tax levy that vigo county schools could levy the taxpayer to fund the expenses in the operations fund and i will tell you if you break that levy down per kid it's different for

  88. 0:40:22 — open the recording at 40 minutes 22 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) every every school in the state of indiana there is a gamut of how that how that works in the per per funding because it was never meant to be a per kid funding it's a it's a rate levy type driven situation okay so that levy does grow every year by something called the max levy growth quotient acronym mlgq the max levy growth quotient has had some unique history to it over the last couple years and i'm going to get more into that in a second i've got my next slide kind of talks through the history of that fund but just remember it's got a cap to it and so the school district

  89. 0:41:03 — open the recording at 41 minutes 3 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) has to live has to keep its expenses within that cap in the operations fund because there's really no other revenue source coming in there okay operate or your operating referendum fund is capped by the amount that the voters approved so our voters went to the ballot they approved a tax rate and so the school district is allowed to tax up to that cap whatever that tax rate produces That's what they are able to levy the taxpayer for, and they cannot go above that. That's why we have referendums. That's why we put it on the ballot.

  90. 0:41:40 — open the recording at 41 minutes 40 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) Very strict means that they have to live in to keep those dollars limited to the tax rate that the voters approved. All right. So this slide gets into that cap in the operations fund. so prior to 2024 that max levy growth quotient there is a statutory calculation that drives that inflation that factor that we multiply every year by so again 2019 Vigo County Schools had a base levy established 2020 it grew by the max levy growth quotient that was given to them by the state for the most part it's the same for every school in the state and it was driven by a

  91. 0:42:27 — open the recording at 42 minutes 27 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) calculation that is in my fourth bullet point it's the average change in non-farm personal income in the state on a six-year rolling average so as that change in personal income goes up the mlgq would grow with it and the schools could increase their operational revenue property tax revenue a little bit more the inverse could happen if income goes down in the state and that six-year rolling average happens we might have a smaller mlgq okay so in 2023 the mlgq was five percent and that was driven by the calculation that i have on bullet point number four

  92. Highlight drawn from this moment: State lawmakers cap Vigo County Schools' property-tax growth at 4.4% for a third year running

    0:43:11 — open the recording at 43 minutes 11 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) in 2023 one thing that our legislators did is they said in 24 and 25 we're going to cap the max levy growth quotient at four percent and so they kind of for those two years essentially set the calculation aside and they said we're just going to cap it at four percent So in 24 and 25, our school districts were able to increase their property tax levy in the operations fund by 4% and 4%.

  93. 0:43:46 — open the recording at 43 minutes 46 secondsSpeaker 95 (staff (district administration -- superintendent or CFO, unresolved)) Correct. Yes. Yes.

  94. 0:43:57 — open the recording at 43 minutes 57 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) and so then in 2025 our legislators came out and they capped it again in 26 so for 24 25 and 26 at this point that that calculation that six-year rolling average calculation has been set aside and we're living at a four percent increase in the revenue coming into that fund as so as of right Right now we're not sure about 27 what it's going to look like. If they don't cap it again while they're in session, then I'm going to assume the the calculation will come back into place. So that's one thing we're really kind of watching is to see because so many schools are struggling

  95. 0:44:38 — open the recording at 44 minutes 38 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) in their operations fund with expenses and trying to fund them is what that growth quotient is going to be for 2027.

  96. 0:44:45 — open the recording at 44 minutes 45 secondsCarrie (board member) Okay. Chad, do you know what the actual calculations were for 24, 25, 26? Yeah. Back of the napkin

  97. Highlight drawn from this moment: State lawmakers cap Vigo County Schools' property-tax growth at 4.4% for a third year running

    0:44:54 — open the recording at 44 minutes 54 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) calculations would have put 24 and 25 more around five and a half percent. And I think 26 probably would have been a five and a half, maybe even a little closer to six. Just because income in the state of Indiana average income has gone up and so that has caused and one thing in some of those early years since it's a six-year rolling average we even had some years prior to 23 where the MLGQ was three percent because we had some of our recession years we actually had one year that the change in personal income in the state of Indiana actually declined during the recession

  98. 0:45:34 — open the recording at 45 minutes 34 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) years and so as we as we got rid of those recession years and brought on some of our more norm we started it creeped up to like four four and a half and then it got up to the five and 23. but yeah we would have been around five and a half five and a half for those three years

  99. 0:45:52 — open the recording at 45 minutes 52 secondsCarrie (board member) had it not been kept and any idea what in dollar amount that would have the effect of the cap would

  100. 0:45:58 — open the recording at 45 minutes 58 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) be uh yeah that would be i mean i don't know specifically for vigo schools but um it it probably would have been in the millions um for sure that that would have been not not able to levy the taxpayer for sure yeah thank you because your operations fund levies probably around 13 million 20 million 29 million is our max so if their max is 29 we take a percent and a half away

  101. Highlight drawn from this moment: State lawmakers cap Vigo County Schools' property-tax growth at 4.4% for a third year running

    0:46:25 — open the recording at 46 minutes 25 secondsSpeaker 113 from that yeah it was 28 27 987 or 947 so through a million yep so two three million dollars

  102. 0:46:36 — open the recording at 46 minutes 36 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) yep okay great questions um i want to briefly just talk about property tax caps this is uh you know kind of old news for a lot of us because this is something that dates back to 2010 but i think sometimes we lose the fact that our school districts are losing money and are all of our governmental units not just school districts are losing money to property tax caps vego county schools loses money so i just want to go back over how what property tax caps are and how they work so in 2010 um we we the citizens of indiana voted into the state constitution the idea of property

  103. 0:47:18 — open the recording at 47 minutes 18 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) tax caps and what that simply did is it took every property that paid property tax and it put them into three buckets and so one of the buckets is titled homestead and homestead properties are capped at one percent other residential which is a lot of our like rental properties and farm ground are capped at two percent and then all other which is most of our commercial property is capped at three percent and so i want to talk a little bit about what this cap means so i'm going to use a simplistic example to say if i own a homestead what's classified as a homestead and i'm capped

  104. 0:47:58 — open the recording at 47 minutes 58 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) at one percent it's i'm capped at one percent of the what i call the gross assessed value of my home and the gross assessed value is the value that the assessor county assessor assigns to my property if that cat if that amount is two hundred thousand dollars and my cap is one percent i never pay more than two thousand dollars in property taxes on that particular piece of property because i'm capped at one percent of the gross assessed value which is two hundred thousand dollars okay so if all the governmental entities the school the town the county the libraries police whoever

  105. 0:48:36 — open the recording at 48 minutes 36 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) taxes that property they all do their budgets and they submit them and they're approved by the state and then we send out tax bills and that that taxpayer gets their form and it says you owe twenty five hundred dollars that's what the budgets say that's what that's what all these entities need to fund their uh to fund their budgets if it says twenty five hundred dollars we then look at the cap if the cap says two thousand they don't pay 25 they pay two thousand and that five hundred dollars that they don't pay is what i call property tax cap loss it's revenue

  106. Highlight drawn from this moment: Vigo County Schools has lost $80 million to $100 million in property tax revenue since 2015 to the state's tax caps

    0:49:15 — open the recording at 49 minutes 15 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) that all the governmental units not just the school district they don't receive in property tax for a school district we are taking that property tax cap revenue loss in our operations fund only so it's a hit to the operations fund so that's a that's another now we've been dealing with this for many many over 20 years now or almost 20 years i guess but um i i don't like to lose sight of it because it is still something that we're losing dollars to and it is revenue that we are not receiving so when donna says our operations fund max levy is 28 million dollars that doesn't include

  107. 0:49:59 — open the recording at 49 minutes 59 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) the circuit breaker loss that we're not receiving off of that okay so we're projecting over 10 for

  108. 0:50:09 — open the recording at 50 minutes 9 secondsSpeaker 59 (staff (district administration -- superintendent or CFO, unresolved)) this year and cumulatively since 2015. the reason why i can only go back to 2015 is because we apparently now let's do a public record request with the state to receive our own information

  109. 0:50:22 — open the recording at 50 minutes 22 secondsSpeaker 83 but you know at least since 2015 it adds up to over 150 million

  110. 0:50:28 — open the recording at 50 minutes 28 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) what's unique about property tax caps um and when i was at when i was a cfo of franklin township schools uh we were up there with vigo county like in the top 10 probably we were like number three as far as revenue loss in 2011 kind of the first year property tax caps kicking in and so it was significant it is and was significant dollars but what we started to learn is that while we're losing 10 or 11 million dollars in vego county to circuit breaker property tax caps we have the majority of our school districts losing nothing or 25 000 or 10 000

  111. 0:51:14 — open the recording at 51 minutes 14 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) and so i say that because it impacts every school district differently it's just kind of the luck of the draw that you guys are losing so many dollars and i'll be honest with you you might think well why is that the reason that that is you're going to see more loss of property tax dollars in areas that have multiple taxing units taxing one taxpayer so because that one taxpayer that i used before has a cap of two thousand dollars well i look at it as a revenue bucket right and so our school is filling up some of the bucket our town is filling up the bucket the county probably

  112. 0:52:03 — open the recording at 52 minutes 3 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) has a tax filling up the bucket well the bucket fills up faster that if i live out in a rural area where i might just be paying a school and a county tax and i'm not within city limits and so when you find your larger cities like um terra haute vego county you've got multiple people taxing the same taxpayer and so the bucket fills up faster and so that's what we started to see also in communities that are highly residential because the majority of your taxpayers are capped at one percent franklin township was a good

  113. 0:52:43 — open the recording at 52 minutes 43 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) example although we were a suburb of we were in marion county suburb of indianapolis 95 of our tax base was capped at one percent we had no businesses um you might also be um in a in an area where you have businesses but if they're tiffed then they don't they don't feed into that property they don't they don't pay that property tax either so that could also increase your circuit breaker loss so it really goes back to the makeup of the tax base um i always use i live in plainfield i always use kind of plainfield as an example they have kind of the perfect tax-based

  114. 0:53:24 — open the recording at 53 minutes 24 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) makeup they've got if you look at their makeup they've got 50 businesses they've got a little bit of farm ground they've got some residential like they have almost kind of the perfect pie if you look at the makeup of their one two and three percent whereas franklin township was all heavy on residential and we didn't have any businesses um and so everything's capped at one percent so i just drive that point home you guys have your own unique makeup of your tax base so does every governmental entity or school district and so but you guys are heavily impacted

  115. 0:53:57 — open the recording at 53 minutes 57 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) by this circuit breaker loss it's in the state constitution and so we have to deal with that moving forward okay all right um two more slides on senate enrolled act one something new that we're dealing with legislatively um and then i'll i'll stop talking let you ask questions and be done okay i'm just going to kind of there are multiple things that impact school districts uh with senate bill one some of them might impact bego county schools and some of them may not okay so i'm just going to kind of walk through them number one in our debt service fund that i talked about earlier

  116. 0:54:32 — open the recording at 54 minutes 32 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) funded by property tax we repay our mortgages on our buildings our debt something new that started in last year is that our legislators put a cap in place that said any public school district that has a property tax rate over 80 cents in the debt service fund if they want to do any new they want to issue any kind of new municipal bonds or any debt moving forward it must go on a ballot so now tax rate forces forces the project it didn't matter if it was a 500 000 debt or a 100 million dollar bond issue had to go to referendum if tax rate was over 80 cents

  117. 0:55:19 — open the recording at 55 minutes 19 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) senate enrolled act one dropped the 80 cents down to 70. so now moving forward any school district that has a debt service tax rate over 70 any bond issue any kind of debt they incur moving forward must go on a ballot. Okay? Questions about that?

  118. 0:55:40 — open the recording at 55 minutes 40 secondsSpeaker 131 Ours is 24.

  119. 0:55:42 — open the recording at 55 minutes 42 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) I was waiting. I knew one of them was going to ask. Yeah, and so you guys are nowhere near the 70 cents right now at 24 cents. But that is something we've seen a change in that, and that is something that we're monitoring moving forward to see if that changes in the future. Okay? the second part of um sea1 under assessed values that it's going to do is that currently our taxpayers are paying property tax on about two-thirds of their assessed value and here's what i mean we have the gross assessed value that is assigned to a property by our county assessor. That's the gross.

  120. 0:56:29 — open the recording at 56 minutes 29 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) Then in the state of Indiana, we have deductions. You know, we have a supplement. We have a homestead deduction, a supplemental homestead deduction. And so the deductions are in place set by the state. Bring that gross assessed value down to the net assessed value. Well, for us in school finance, we levy the taxpayer. The net assessed value is actually what we're paying taxes on. OK, so you got to think about that. if we have changes in deductions, it changes the taxable value of our property. SEA 1 does a couple different things. Essentially, from a high-level standpoint,

  121. 0:57:09 — open the recording at 57 minutes 9 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) it is going to reduce net assessed values. It is going to bring down the taxable value of properties over the next six years. It's kind of a six-year implementation. The gross assessed value that is in line with the market doesn't change how this is going to mechanically work are those deductions are going to get bigger and bigger and bigger every year for the next six years starting in 2026 okay so by the end of this full kind of implementation property tax payers will go from paying property tax on two thirds of the value of their home down to a third.

  122. 0:57:52 — open the recording at 57 minutes 52 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) So you're going to see the net assessed values decline by about another third over the next six years through the growth of deductions. OK, so homesteads are going to get a new deduction coming into place. It's going to grow. That's going to bring those assessed values down. And that's our one percent property. I'm not going to get into really the details of all of this, because that could be probably a four hour conversation. But our farmland, our 2% properties, the farmland and the rental properties, they never had deductions before 2026.

  123. 0:58:29 — open the recording at 58 minutes 29 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) They had a gross assessed value and then they pay taxes on the gross. Starting in 2026, our rental property owners and our farmers are going to have deductions now. Now they're going to have a net assessed value and the net assessed value is going to in or the deductions are going to increase for them over the next six years and it's going to bring their taxable values down okay the commercial property is a little bit different again i'm not going to dig into the details of this but essentially how they're going to be impacted is that right now part of your school district's net assessed

  124. 0:59:08 — open the recording at 59 minutes 8 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) value that they're taxing on has a portion of it that is what's called business personal property so in simplistic terms i like to say we've got a manufacturing facility over here all the property all the machines inside the conveyor belts and all that is business personal property it has a valuation to it and that valuation they pay property tax on and it's part of are taxable our property tax taxable value every district obviously the more businesses you have the more value is there versus a rural school district that doesn't have any businesses

  125. 0:59:46 — open the recording at 59 minutes 46 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) essentially what is going to happen is that the the business personal property that they are paying taxes on that value is going to shrink or eventually maybe go away so there's a lot of different mechanics i've got there again i'm not going to get into the details of that but that's how our three percent properties they're still paying taxes on their building itself as property tax but it's that business personal property that's going to be impacted for them so there's kind of a combination of things that are going to happen over the next six years to

  126. Highlight drawn from this moment: State lawmakers cap Vigo County Schools' property-tax growth at 4.4% for a third year running

    1:00:15 — open the recording at 1 hour 15 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) decrease the net assessed values of um our for our school district and their budgets okay the operations fund um i've really talked about the first bullet point it's got a cap the 4.4 percent mlgq cap in 2026. another caveat here though in the operations fund is that any school district there's some requirements around sharing their operations fund dollars with charter schools

  127. 1:00:45 — open the recording at 1 hour 45 secondsSpeaker 52 (unknown (contaminated label)) moving forward if a school district is impacted in that manner i'm not sure if you guys are going to be impacted by that i'm not sure that you are yet three more referendums so referendums moving

  128. 1:00:57 — open the recording at 1 hour 57 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) forward before school districts could run a referendum in the spring or the fall and they could run it any year there was no requirements when they could or couldn't run a referendum campaign moving forward referendums for school districts now can only be ran during a general election and it can only be ran in the fall so there's some there's some requirements now around when school districts can run referendums and when they can't. And they also there are some requirements. I've gotten the last bullet point. Any school district that has the greater of 100 students

  129. 1:01:38 — open the recording at 1 hour 1 minute 38 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) or 2% of its spring enrollment count attending a charter school, they have to now start sharing their operating referendum dollars with the charter school. And there's a there's a per student calculation. And so we are seeing some schools start to be impacted by that. Local income tax. Vigo County is a local income tax county. There's about 50 ish percent of our counties in the state that have a local income tax in place. And so right now, up through 2028, the county shares its local income tax has something called certified shares.

  130. 1:02:20 — open the recording at 1 hour 2 minutes 20 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) It is shares some of that income tax with the school district. starting in 2028 part of sea1 our county no longer has to share that revenue with the school district so that is going to be some revenue loss for some of our school districts starting in 2028 okay and so really the biggie i say the last bullet point kind of as the grand finale here the last two bullet points here really the big part of senate enrolled act one big deal assessed values declining that that is a biggie but really this last bullet point is the biggest starting in

  131. Highlight drawn from this moment: SEA 1 creates a new credit for qualifying homestead property owners, reducing local tax collections

    1:03:03 — open the recording at 1 hour 3 minutes 3 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) 2026 as part of senate enrolled act one every homeowner that falls into that one percent category so not the twos or the threes every homeowner on their 2026 property tax bill and moving forward is going to start receiving a credit credit different than a deduction a deduction reduces the assessed the taxable value a credit is a dollar for dollar minus off of the off the net liability okay so sea1 says that every homeowner will receive the lesser of 10 percent of the final tax liability up to three hundred dollars so i'm going to go back to my

  132. Highlight drawn from this moment: SEA 1 creates a new credit for qualifying homestead property owners, reducing local tax collections

    1:03:47 — open the recording at 1 hour 3 minutes 47 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) example before we have the two hundred thousand dollar home capped at two thousand dollars all the entities do their budgets they say you owe us 2 500 but they only pay 2 000 okay so we get down to the 2 000 for that homeowner now the homestead credit kicks in it's gonna they're going to receive a dollar for dollar credit off of the 2000 equal to 10 of the tax liability up to 300 so they're going to receive the 10 they're going to get another 200 off of the 2000 so now their net liability is 1800 the 200 they didn't pay is essentially more property tax revenue lost to

  133. 1:04:35 — open the recording at 1 hour 4 minutes 35 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) all the governmental units including vigo county schools okay um and so that's where the majority of the property tax i guess relief i would say is coming um to property taxpayers from senate

  134. 1:04:49 — open the recording at 1 hour 4 minutes 49 secondsSpeaker 52 (unknown (contaminated label)) enrolled act one okay all right i've given you close to an hour ish of school finance you've

  135. 1:04:57 — open the recording at 1 hour 4 minutes 57 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) been great students most people are like what time is it i got it someplace to be at this point I'm going to pause there. Do you have questions? Anything you want me to go back over?

  136. 1:05:08 — open the recording at 1 hour 5 minutes 8 secondsSpeaker 142 It's a lot of information. Yes, sir. Yeah. Is over 65 receives an additional 150? Yes.

  137. 1:05:17 — open the recording at 1 hour 5 minutes 17 secondsSpeaker 146 Is age the only requirement or are there additional income and assessed value limitations on the property that's being taxed? I think there might be. I think there might be

  138. Highlight drawn from this moment: SEA 1 creates a new credit for qualifying homestead property owners, reducing local tax collections

    1:05:31 — open the recording at 1 hour 5 minutes 31 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) some other requirements so there's currently over 65 credit in place and it's got an amount to it that are deductions and this just add it doesn't really change the requirements or the language it just adds another 150 credit up to the top of it

  139. 1:05:54 — open the recording at 1 hour 5 minutes 54 secondsSpeaker 25 be receiving it yes yes yes that is my understanding on that one yes

  140. 1:06:01 — open the recording at 1 hour 6 minutes 1 secondSpeaker 150 I think you might have wondered too about the local income tax 1.7 is what we're currently

  141. 1:06:10 — open the recording at 1 hour 6 minutes 10 seconds in.

  142. 1:06:11 — open the recording at 1 hour 6 minutes 11 secondsSpeaker 2 (chair) Chad, did we skip over any slides that bring more revenue to the school corporations? You covered it all?

  143. 1:06:19 — open the recording at 1 hour 6 minutes 19 secondsSpeaker 52 (unknown (contaminated label)) I covered it all. Okay.

  144. 1:06:21 — open the recording at 1 hour 6 minutes 21 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) Unfortunately, yes. I know it's, I've done a lot of these over the last year and it's not the most uplifting information I know.

  145. 1:06:28 — open the recording at 1 hour 6 minutes 28 secondsSpeaker 94 To give you some historical value, I'm going to defer that I say it wrong.

  146. 1:06:34 — open the recording at 1 hour 6 minutes 34 secondsSpeaker 59 (staff (district administration -- superintendent or CFO, unresolved)) He's going to correct me. But this has been an ongoing issue. I think the original property tax reform goes back to 1973, which had an impact on schools. Then there was a law case in the mid-'90s, which involved Lake County and a community municipality called St. John, Indiana, that had a decision made in the court. That goes back to two people who moved into two spec homes. One of the people living in the spec home had lived there for years and years and years, and the other one just bought it. And same square footage, same layout, they were basically two identical homes.

  147. 1:07:13 — open the recording at 1 hour 7 minutes 13 secondsSpeaker 59 (staff (district administration -- superintendent or CFO, unresolved)) And one paid three times more in property taxes than the other one because one had been there for years and years and years, and the other one got it newly assessed when they bought it. That was the law case. The result of that law case is what led to 2008 when we have the property tax caps and another major piece of property tax reform. And then everything since 2008 has been trying to tweak and fix the unintended consequences of 2008. And that's where how we ended up getting to the different variations, most recent one being Senator Roback.

  148. 1:07:51 — open the recording at 1 hour 7 minutes 51 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) Yes, no, that is that is true. and I didn't talk a lot about what Dr. Hemslell is referring to is that our gross assessed value on our properties that I talked about now, our county assessors, there are guidelines in place to how that assessment happens. And it has to be trended to the market, meaning that when they assess a piece of property, there's a calculation that they look at and statistics that they look at say what is the market data and our assess our gross assessed values trend with the market data

  149. 1:08:30 — open the recording at 1 hour 8 minutes 30 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) that is why over the last four or five years we've seen gross assessed values on properties not just in vigo county but across the entire state go up by 10 15 20 30 percent or more that's because the price of a home today is not what it was six years ago and that's not something the school has any control over the and our assessors are required to trend it with the market it costs a lot more to buy a home in Vigo County today than it did 10 years ago that's just the simple math of that and so Dr. Hemsley was right before we had that system which to me seems like a

  150. 1:09:03 — open the recording at 1 hour 9 minutes 3 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) reasonable system properties didn't properties might go 10 years and not get reassessed hence you had the same house paying 3 000 and another house paying 1500 because the assessments were way off because we didn't have the market based or trending system in place i want to be clear that sea1 does not change the way we assess properties they didn't touch that it's going to gross assessed values are going to continue to trend with the market it's the deductions that

  151. 1:09:34 — open the recording at 1 hour 9 minutes 34 secondsSpeaker 159 are being put in place that brings that taxable value down that's going to be put into place

  152. 1:09:43 — open the recording at 1 hour 9 minutes 43 secondsSpeaker 57 (staff (district administration -- superintendent or CFO, unresolved)) yeah one other thing to consider on the circuit breaker of loss the way the vigo county schools has helped with that over time is we instituted rolling short-term general obligation bonds to cover some of those large capital needs that we were no longer being able to fund so that's what dr himself talked about our tax rate it's predominantly short-term general obligation bonds

  153. 1:10:05 — open the recording at 1 hour 10 minutes 5 secondsSpeaker 63 (staff (district administration -- superintendent or CFO, unresolved)) now that are rolling that we do roofing pay big hvc projects out on an annual basis because when you lose that kind of revenue but money's just not there

  154. Highlight drawn from this moment: Vigo County Schools has lost $80 million to $100 million in property tax revenue since 2015 to the state's tax caps

    1:10:17 — open the recording at 1 hour 10 minutes 17 secondsSpeaker 59 (staff (district administration -- superintendent or CFO, unresolved)) i also want to clarify i just spoke and i transferred two numbers it's a close to 80 to 100 million that's accumulated

  155. 1:10:25 — open the recording at 1 hour 10 minutes 25 secondsSpeaker 95 (staff (district administration -- superintendent or CFO, unresolved)) about 150 i transposed about 80 to 100 i saw donna look so i want to clarify that i moved two numbers it's about 80 to 100 million that's accumulated

  156. 1:10:39 — open the recording at 1 hour 10 minutes 39 secondsSpeaker 165 the other thing too when i'm when i work with school districts

  157. 1:10:42 — open the recording at 1 hour 10 minutes 42 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) I always like to point out, I feel like, with some of our recent changes, like with the Homestead Credit and that 80 cents, 70 cents in the debt service fund, because Dr. Hemswell's right, when we voted property tax caps into the Constitution, that solidifies the 1, 2, and 3 percent. Like, can it be changed? Yes. But Dr. Hemswell's right, since 2010, things have been tweaked to kind of navigate it, and how do we fix this part? you know how do we how do we how do we improve this what how do we do this and so we've had

  158. 1:11:19 — open the recording at 1 hour 11 minutes 19 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) little things done over the last couple years to that kind of interfere with the property tax caps but they're in the constitution so they're probably not going to win the homestead credit is not in the constitution it's just statute it's just law right and so I always like to you know make sure that my school clients understand that could be changed the next year I'm not saying our legislators would do that but it could be because it's not constitutional could the $300 be raised or lowered it could could the 10% be raised or lowered it could

  159. 1:11:59 — open the recording at 1 hour 11 minutes 59 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) so I think we have to really kind of keep our eye on that as as we think about our property tax revenue coming into our school district and really what's going on with that home state credit

  160. 1:12:09 — open the recording at 1 hour 12 minutes 9 secondsSpeaker 169 Chad, passing SEA 1, they knew there would be a significant reduction in revenue for school districts. What was their intention or what was their plan for how corporations would make up the difference?

  161. 1:12:26 — open the recording at 1 hour 12 minutes 26 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) I mean, I don't see where there is any revenue source coming in to help make up the difference. I think the idea is it was kind of the same thing with property tax caps, is that because in the state of Indiana, property tax essentially funds services, right? It's funding our public services. I think it's important to understand that as property tax reduces all of our governmental entities, not just the school district, they have to reduce expenses accordingly because we have to keep our budgets balanced. I mean, that's what Donna does every day, right?

  162. 1:13:06 — open the recording at 1 hour 13 minutes 6 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) That's what we're trying to do is keep our budgets balanced. So as revenue comes down, whether I'm a school district or I'm a city or a county or I'm a fire department or whatever I am, as revenue goes down, I have to adjust expenses because, I mean, I have to keep my budgets balanced. That's what we do. And so I think that's what we've seen over the last since property tax caps every year. Our revenue has changed and you've got declining enrollment, property tax revenue going down. So you've seen our school districts turn to one of two things.

  163. 1:13:40 — open the recording at 1 hour 13 minutes 40 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) You've got to reduce services and bring the expenses down to stay in line with the revenue, or your tool in the toolbox is to run a referendum, which you guys have done. And we're going to probably see a lot more schools do coming up on our ballot this fall. Probably more than we've ever seen before would be my prediction. So I kind of, to answer your question is, there is no revenue source coming in. I think we're only really looking at, my opinion legislatively, we're only really looking at the revenue side. And we're not really taking into account the expense side.

  164. 1:14:17 — open the recording at 1 hour 14 minutes 17 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) And so we have to adjust expenses. And that comes in multiple ways in a school district. that comes in the way of we have to have larger class sizes and less instructional staff maybe we have to reduce bus routes and so we have kids on buses longer these are just ideas that I see a lot of schools doing I mean there's different things like that I think the thing to always remember in a school district salaries and benefits are the largest expense our next largest expense would be things like utilities insurance you just kind of go down that list and capital

  165. 1:14:56 — open the recording at 1 hour 14 minutes 56 secondsChad Blacklock (outside presenter (school finance consultant, Stifel)) so that's where you know most school districts have to turn if they can't if they decide they don't want to run a referendum or they've tried it and they've failed then you have to there's really no other way for a school district to increase revenue beyond getting more kids or doing a reference. That's really the only tools in that toolbox. So kind of a

  166. 1:15:21 — open the recording at 1 hour 15 minutes 21 secondsSpeaker 110 long-winded answer to answer your question.

  167. 1:15:23 — open the recording at 1 hour 15 minutes 23 secondsSpeaker 175 That's helpful.

  168. 1:15:31 — open the recording at 1 hour 15 minutes 31 secondsSpeaker 177 Anything I didn't cover?

  169. 1:15:34 — open the recording at 1 hour 15 minutes 34 secondsSpeaker 52 (unknown (contaminated label)) You're welcome. Yeah, thanks, Chad. Thank you guys for having me. Good luck in your decision-making moving forward.

  170. 1:15:45 — open the recording at 1 hour 15 minutes 45 secondsChristopher A. Himsel (superintendent) We hope that was helpful. We hope that that answered some of the questions that I know some of you had in terms of what are the tools in the toolbox, what are the restrictions, why can't this be fun or why isn't that. Hopefully that was helpful to you. Carrie, that's like the third or fourth time. Thank you for being patient through that. That is all we have for today. We're working on a presentation then for Monday as you've requested and we'll go through and help give you additional information to understand those six options that we told

  171. 1:16:19 — open the recording at 1 hour 16 minutes 19 secondsChristopher A. Himsel (superintendent) you about the last time and give you additional information for each of those on Monday is what we're working towards. Thank you for your opportunity.

  172. 1:16:26 — open the recording at 1 hour 16 minutes 26 secondsSpeaker 182 Thank you.

  173. 1:16:27 — open the recording at 1 hour 16 minutes 27 seconds Thank you.

  174. 1:16:28 — open the recording at 1 hour 16 minutes 28 secondsSpeaker 104 I know that we have many members of the public here, but any comments from the public?

  175. Highlight drawn from this moment: Vigo County Schools has lost $80 million to $100 million in property tax revenue since 2015 to the state's tax capsHighlight drawn from this moment: State lawmakers cap Vigo County Schools' property-tax growth at 4.4% for a third year runningHighlight drawn from this moment: SEA 1 creates a new credit for qualifying homestead property owners, reducing local tax collectionsHighlight drawn from this moment: State budget ends a $155-per-student textbook grant; district cites grant loss and enrollment decline in a $1.5 million annual shortfall

    1:16:36 — open the recording at 1 hour 16 minutes 36 secondsSpeaker 184 Okay. Make a motion adjourned.

  176. 1:16:42 — open the recording at 1 hour 16 minutes 42 secondsSpeaker 185 Thank you, Mark.

  177. 1:16:43 — open the recording at 1 hour 16 minutes 43 secondsSpeaker 9 (chair) Second. Sang by Heather. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Thank you everybody.

Marked moments above are where the archive's reviewed highlights were drawn from. Everything else on this page is unreviewed.