Hamilton County Trustee Bill Hullander talks in the stock room of the Trustee’s satellite office in the Bonny Oaks Industrial Park in this file photo.Hamilton County Department of Education budget summary
1. Salaries: $203 million 2. Benefits: $78 million 3. Transportation: $12.6 million 4. Utilities: $11 million 5. Custodial contract: $10.1 million 6. Charter school payments: $6.3 million 7. Trustee commission: $3.8 million 8. Exceptional Education contracts with private agencies: $3 million 9. Capital maintenance fund transfers: $3 million 10. Building and liability insurance: $2.7 million 11. Instructional supplies: $1.6 million 12. Textbooks: $1.6 million 13. Maintenance and building repair: $1.5 million 14. Data and telephone communications: $1 million 15. Individual expenses under $1 million, including software licenses, disposal fees, legal fees, copier costs: $5.7 million Source: Hamilton County Department of Education
The Hamilton County Department of Education recently boiled down its annual budget to a single page.
One item that jumps out at those who see the one-page summary, school officials say, is the $3.8 million “trustee commission,” a fee the school district pays annually to Hamilton County Trustee Bill Hullander’s office. It’s the seventh-largest item on the budget; more than the $1.6 million for textbooks and the $1.6 million for instructional supplies spent by the 43,000-student district.
“People look at it and say, ‘What’s that?'” said Christie Jordan, the school district’s director of accounting and budgeting.
State law requires the trustee’s office to act as the school district’s bank, Jordan said, and the trustee’s office keeps a percentage of the revenue the schools take in. The commission amounts to 2 percent of property tax and 1 percent of sales tax revenues.
The Hamilton County Trustee’s Office typically takes in more fees each year than it needs to run the office, and at the end of the year puts the excess money into the county’s general fund budget. This year, Hullander expects to put about $7 million in excess funds into the general fund.
School officials, who bemoan what they see as underfunding from the state and county, would like to have the $3.8 million trustee commission returned to the school district out of the excess funds.
But Hullander says the Tennessee General Assembly would have to change the way his office interacts with the school district. And county Mayor Jim Coppinger said county government, which has a tight budget, too, relies on the excess from the trustee’s office.
“We just do what the state of Tennessee [says],” Hullander said. “We charge the school system the way the state code is written up. We get a percentage.”
Hullander said his office does its work with a smaller staff than trustees’ offices in other large Tennessee counties.
“We just run a lean machine, and that allows us to be able to turn the [excess] money back over,” said Hullander, who’s in the first year of his second four-year term as trustee.
“There is a lot that our office does for the school system.”
Coppinger opposes the idea of routing annual excess funds from the trustee’s office into the school district’s coffers.
“That’s not a revenue source for them, in my opinion,” Coppinger said. “That money is how the trustee runs their office.”
County government counts on the excess funds it gets each year from the trustee’s office, he said.
“That would be a huge hit to our [county] general budget,” said Coppinger.
He said funding is tight for all local governments — including county government, which several years ago had to cut expenses by $13 million and lay off employees.
Contact staff writer Tim Omarzu at tomarzu@timesfreepress.com or www.facebook.com/tim.omarzu or twitter.com/TimOmarzu or 423-757-6651.