Carbon Career and Technical Institute will have to wait another month for its budget to be acted upon in Palmerton Area School District.

Palmerton’s board tabled CCTI’s $9 million spending plan for 2023-24 on Tuesday night based on the recommendation of Earl Paules, who has been critical of the amount of fund balance the school is holding.

“I’ve been working hard behind the scenes there to create some policies to address these concerns,” Paules said. “They have policies that say their fund balance has to be between 5 and 8% of their budget, but it’s not being enforced. I want to make sure the policies to update that are being written and I feel we’ll have better leverage if we table their budget.”

Voting to table were Earl Paules, Danielle Paules, Tammy Recker, Audrey Larvey, Sherry Haas, and Erin Snyder. Brandon Mazepa, Doris Zellers and Stacey Connell were in objection.

“I don’t feel comfortable holding this money hostage,” Mazepa told Paules. “I think you could use your leadership in a different sense to get these policies done and light a flame under them to move forward. I do agree this is an issue and it’s important.”

Paules advocated in January that the five sending schools to CCTI receive money back, which would reduce the overall fund balance.

That same month, CCTI Business Manager Jeffrey Deutsch said while the school does have around $4 million in its fund balance, roughly $2.3 million of that is committed for items such as post-retirement employee benefits.

“The $1.7 million is the unassigned money we have to work with and that is there because we do have some capital expenditures that may be coming up and we’re looking to offer some more programs that may eat that up pretty quickly,” Deutsch said.

“Any refund would be a JOC decision and would then most likely have us coming back to you to ask for more money every year, which is something we’ve been trying to avoid.”

Since then, Panther Valley, Weatherly and Lehighton have passed CCTI’s budget. Four out of the five sending school districts must pass it for it to become official.

Jim Thorpe, like Palmerton, tabled a vote until March.

Though Panther Valley passed the budget, its directors voiced similar concerns to those of Paules.

“When we’re broke, and we don’t have money to take care of our business and our school district, and we’re giving to yours, so you can have a fund balance, it looks foolish to our taxpayers,” Panther Valley director Michael Alabovitz said. “They’re looking at us, like ‘You people are out of your minds.’?”

Deutsch said CCTI has been able for 10 years to not ask for an overall increase from sending districts but is moving toward a deficit mode.

The school ran a deficit in the 2021-22 school year for the first time in nearly a decade.

“We might have a surplus this year, but the projection is we’ll go right back to a deficit,” Deutsch said.

Any updated CCTI fund balance policy likely wouldn’t get passed in time to affect the 2023-24 budget, but Paules is hopeful things can be addressed sooner rather than later.

“I just want to make sure there is no gray area in the policy that is written stating how much unreserved fund balance you can have,” Paules said. “Every other vo-tech school in the state follows this, but we haven’t been.”