Chandler school board approves $410M budget for 2024-25

Even though the Chandler Unified School District Governing Board voted unanimously to approve its annual budget and tax rate July 10, it wasn’t without a long discussion.

Having voted in June to publish its intent to approve a $410 million budget for the 2024-25 budget year, and to commit to that maximum budget, the board gave that document final approval at the July 10 meeting, along with the district’s secondary property tax rate for the year.

Board member Kurt Rohrs reiterated his position that the total dollar amount of annual tax collections by CUSD is a more valuable statistic than rates the district chooses to set.

“I don’t think anybody really cares about tax rates,” Rohrs said. “They care about the amount of money coming out of their pockets. So if we could concentrate more on what people are paying, I think that would be more valuable information to them.”

Rohrs was directing his comments toward Lana Berry, the district’s chief financial officer, who was presenting many aspects of the district budget, mostly focusing on changing revenue streams and the levy.

A moment later, Berry pointed out that Rohrs, a financial advisor and a member of the district’s budget committee before running for the board, likely presented these types of numbers in his work.

“Actually,  Mr. (board member Joel) Wirth had been showing this when he was a CFO for years, even before this,” Berry said, presenting a chart showing 10 years of CUSD property tax liability.

Rohrs, having made his points, voted in favor of both the budget approval and the tax levy.

CUSD will charge a secondary property tax rate of $2.3897, up from $2.3890 this past year. Berry termed that $0.0007 hike a “slight, slight, slight increase.”

In her presentation, Berry said the owner of a property in the district with a valuation of $329,688 will pay almost $2,100 in CUSD property taxes in 2024-25. That’s about $77 more than a property owner with the same valuation was charged in 2023-24.

We’d like to invite our readers to submit their civil comments on this topic.  Email AZOpinions@iniusa.org . Email Jason W. Brooks at jbrooks@iniusa.org .