City Council Work Session

Dustin WrightstaffNo, I really appreciate that question. I think it's a really important one. Some of these numbers are going to be pretty close, but if we want the exact numbers, I would want to go back and get those. I think where you're seeing in any school budget, and this applies to ours even though we have a nontraditional process, but in Fairfax County the last several years, I think it's been between 87% and 88% of their overall budget is all related to employee compensation and employee benefits. So those increases that you're seeing are very much tied to the cost to support the employees. They're not, you know, in my review of their proposed budget, you're not seeing massive increases in their FTEs.

You're not seeing lots of new positions that are coming. You're seeing the agreements that they have with their employees through the collective bargaining process. they're finishing their first year of a CBA and they're moving into their second. Last year had kind of not a, I wouldn't say a catch-up year, but a higher than, it's the highest year in the CBA in terms of the employee compensation. It levels out a little bit this year and stays fairly regular the next few years. I think it's right around 5%. Other big places where you see significant increases is in the cost of benefits. So no different than what we're looking at here in the city government, you know, our health benefits, our retirement benefits, you see those increases.

You know, oftentimes in budgeting practices, at least on the school side, a lot of times a budget will factor in a 10% increase in your medical benefit cost. So I think that's another one, Councilmember Hall. You know, their enrollment is probably not going to continue to go up. again they were expecting about 180,000 and have 177,000 roughly this year and I don't think they're projecting to have a significantly higher enrollment so I think a lot of those increases are all related to those employee compensation

and then the agreements for it impacted the FY26 budget. Some school districts are a little bit different. I used to work for one that they're in year two of the actual contract, so they were about one cycle ahead. There are some, you know, and some of this is just ongoing with the negotiations. THAT SCHOOL DISTRICT THAT I WAS REFERRING TO, THEY'RE ACTUALLY BEGINNING TO RENEGOTIATE THEIR NEXT ROUND. IT'S A FOUR-YEAR CONTRACT, BUT SO IT CAN BE A PART OF THE FISCAL PLANNING PROCESS, THEY HAVE TO DO IT EARLY. IN TERMS OF THE QUESTION AROUND THE INCREASING COST, SO I WOULD SAY, YOU KNOW, IT'S A LOT OF DIFFERENT THINGS. IT IS, AGAIN, THE EMPLOYEE COMPENSATION IS A COMPONENT OF IT. I WOULD SAY YOU'RE HAVING SCHOOLS TRY TO BRING ON ADDITIONAL

I think Chair Pitches wants to answer that one. I think that's a really good question. So one of the things that when, if you read in the state code for when superintendents are asked to develop budgets, they're asked to develop a needs-based budget every single year to identify what are the specific needs of the division and to put that in there. What is a useful rule of thumb, not to be quoted on it, not to be splashed across to the headline Dr. Wright says, is to just roll over a school division you're looking at to do nothing new, just to continue it for another year with those employee compensation increases with other contractual increases. THE HVAC MAINTENANCE CONTRACT IS JUST GOING TO INCREASE FROM YEAR TO YEAR.