GREENFIELD — In response to City Council’s vote last week to cut roughly $1.18 million from the fiscal year 2024 operating budget and reallocate the funds to the School Department, the mayor is withdrawing her request for financial orders totaling $365,000 to supplement the FY24 school budget.

Mayor Roxann Wedegartner submitted her notice of withdrawal on Monday in an email to City Council President Dan Guin and Vice President Christine Forgey.

“This withdrawal notice is the result of the recent City Council votes to add $1,175,594 to the Greenfield public schools FY24 school budget,” Wedegartner wrote. “The $365,000 of supplemental funding is no longer needed by the School Department.”

In April, Wedegartner submitted a $61.6 million budget proposal for FY24, representing a 6.5% increase over the current budget of $57.9 million. Included in that budget was a $1.5 million cut to Superintendent Christine DeBarge’s proposed $23.15 million school budget, reducing the School Department’s requested increase over the current fiscal year’s numbers from 10.35% to 3%.

Between two meetings last week, City Council made nearly $1.18 million in cuts, including reductions to short-term debt service payments, employee health insurance and workers’ compensation, among others. Councilors, who ultimately supported the $61.6 million FY24 operating budget, also had a first reading Thursday night to appropriate $200,000 from the general stabilization fund and $165,000 from free cash to fund the schools’ FY24 budget. Those two requests, however, have since been withdrawn.

“We don’t use [supplemental budgets] very often because it isn’t a way to run a city,” Wedegartner said in a phone interview Tuesday when explaining her decision to withdraw the pair of financial orders. “You try to budget appropriately when you first put forward a budget.”

Precinct 1 Councilor Katherine Golub, however, felt the councilors voted last week “trusting the mayor would fulfill her commitment to that money and those funds would bring us to the amount the schools needed.”

“Her one explanation was, ‘The money was no longer needed by the School Department,’” Golub said. “My question is: has she not read the hundreds of emails she’s received from community members, expressing the clear need for our schools?”

Golub said the supplemental budget request was meant to further close the gap between allocated funding and DeBarge’s original proposal.

“She apparently has not been listening,” Golub said of Wedegartner. “I find that astonishing, appalling.”

Other councilors, however, agreed with the mayor’s rationale for withdrawing the two financial orders.

“Whatever the council cut came to $1.2 million,” said Forgey, who served as the city’s first mayor. “I have no problem with that figure being funded to the schools. However, I do appreciate, from a mayor’s point of view, the logic that is needed to protect the budget that has already been cut, especially the borrowing pieces and insurance pieces.”

Forgey argued the cuts that were reallocated to the budget offered “ample money for the schools to run next year.”

“We do have to be a little bit more financially savvy when it comes to what are we going to do fill in the gaps,” she said.

Reporter Mary Byrne can be reached at mbyrne@recorder.com or 413-930-4429. Twitter: @MaryEByrne.

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