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MARCH 9-15, 2018 VOLUME 3 ISSUE 10
Your Hometown Newspaper
The official newspaper of the Town of Concord, serving Springville, the surrounding communities and Springville-Griffith Institute Central Schools
SGI Board Talks Budget, P-TECH Project By Rich Place
Please join us for a Ribbon Cutting Ceremony
as we celebrate the opening of our new Springville office
Friday, March 9 11:30 am 65 East Main Street, Springville Light refreshments will be served.
SPRING FORWARD Don’t forget to turn your clocks ahead one hour on Sunday, March 11 at 2 a.m.
The Springville GriffithInstitute Board of Education on Tuesday heard indepth presentations on the potential capital project that would bring P-TECH programming to Springville and also a line-by-line update on the district’s budget development. School business administrator Maureen Lee and district treasurer Sara Kennison outlined work on the 2018-19 school budget, which is currently a $38.82 million spending plan, an increase of $1.98 million compared to the current budget. “I’m proud of this budget, a lot of work went into it — a lot of good, collaborative work,” Lee told the board.
March 17-18 and March 24-25 New York State Maple Weekends
PAGES 10-11 SGI Trap Club States Results Ski Racing
next year and so you see the budget reflect that.” The students with disabilities line of the budget jumped from $3.78 million in 2017-18 to a projected $4.89 million next year. The largest jump in that aspect of the budget is an $809,418 in BOCES services. By going line-by-line
through the budget — an intense, hour-long process — school board members noticed several areas that were redistributed, the result of a tag-team effort by Lee and Kennison to better attribute personnel costs to the right budget lines. “It was a lot of digging in,
Village Board Reviews Tentative Budget
Upcoming Events March 17 Cordelian Club Dance
“I know it takes us to the top limit of the (tax) cap but, as you can see, we had some real challenges this year.” Some of the increase is due to an unconventional jump in special education, board members learned, as six special education students entered the district after the start of the school year, according to Superintendent Kimberly Moritz. She called it the “most difficult issue this year financially.” “It is absolutely our responsibility and obligation to educate those students to the best of our ability and sometimes there’s a high price tag with that,” Moritz said. “That’s what we got hit with this year. So those students remain ours for
By Jennifer Weber
The Village of Springville Board of Trustees met on Monday, March 5. Mayor Bill Krebs opened the meeting with a public hearing on the tentative 2018-2019 budget (fiscal year runs June 1, 2018 through May 31, 2019). Krebs described the proposed budget as one that will “provide efficient services with a modest cost increase without going over the tax cap.” The proposed 2018-2019 budget will see a tax rate increase from 1.6 percent to $17.26/1000 with the tax levy set at $1,762,527 or 1.72 percent higher than last year (tax levy cap is $1,785,313 or 3 percent.) Total appropriations are $3,447,872, which is an increase of $19,235 from
last year’s budget by 0.6 percent. “The rise in the appropriations budget line comes from projects including Franklin Street, Heritage Park and the Public Safety Building,” explained Krebs. Projects account for a $331,844 increase from 2015. Overall trend is less than 3 percent growth. The Village pays for the appropriated $3,447,872 through the following budget lines: • Property Tax Levy: $1,762,527 • Other Revenues: $1,450,345 • Unappropriated Fund Balance: $235,000 The general fund is the plan to pay for Village services and community development projects.
See SGI Board page 11
Property taxes provide for 51 percent of this fund, with a large portion, 48 percent, going toward public safety and streets. Krebs also reported that taxable property valuation has increased by $161,125 this year and the Village is experiencing flat trend growth. With a total of 1,659 parcels in the Village for a total taxable value of
$153,289,947, 33 percent of these parcels are exempt from taxes, which is a value of $51,168,187. This makes the total taxable value of parcels in the Village to be $102,121,760. The current Unappropriated Fund Balance for the Village is $1,477,356. New York State
with the large tall houses that we have in our area. The Heary Bros. have a catalog that shows page after page of light rods, connectors, and anything you might want to get, making sure that each structure is protected from a strike of lighting, that could set a barn on fire, causing loss of the hay, equipment that was stored inside and livestock. Inside your house, the television and electronics have a chance of being shorted out. There are cold bolts of lighting that merely destroy
and hot bots of lighting that are so named because they encounter resistance that causes fires. Lightning, of course, is an event of nature. It is the giant spark that uses a negatively charged storm cloud with the positively charged Earth. As I read the old local newspapers, I found that week after week, a barn was struck by lightning and burned to the ground, or it would spread to the other sheds or even a house. You did not have to go out
See Village Board page 2
A Look Back
Lightning Rods and the Heary Bros. By Jolene Hawkins
It’s the time of the year where we get thunderstorms, winds, rain and, of course, lightning! It was during a thunderstorm in 1752 when Ben Franklin discovered that lighting was actually electricity. That discovery paved the way for the development of the first lighting rod called “Franklin Rod.” Now, what does that have to do with anything? Well in 1895, Ira Moore, who was a traveling salesman, stopped off at the Hamburg Hotel and tempted the bartender with a chance to augment his income by selling lightning arrestors. Here we are six generations later and the Heary Brothers
Emerling 195 West Main Street, Springville, NY (716)592-2881 www.emerlingcdjr.com
Company is still producing lighting protection devices. How does a lightning rod work? In plain English, a lighting rod or lightning conductor is an iron rod that is used to make lighting strike it, rather than strike something else. It’s part of a lightning protection system. Such a system is made of many rods. These rods are usually placed at high points of buildings and structures. In addition, paths are made, so the electricity can be taken from the rooftop to the ground. So who has these devices locally? Buffalo General Hospital and the Erie Community College downtown campus are equipped with the preventor
systems, along with St Aloysius Recreation Hall in Springville, and then there are larger customers such as the Citicorp skyscraper in New York City, the dome which houses Howard Hughes’s Spruce Goose airplane in Long Beach, Calif. and the United States Mint Building in Philadelphia, Pa., even the Statue of Liberty! And we cannot forget the Buffalo Museum of Science, the Occidental Office Building in Niagara Falls and the Helmsley Palace Hotel in New York City. Around here, lightning would strike barns, along
See A Look Back page 12
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