The Receipts Are In

The State Comptroller Just Confirmed What Bellport Already Knew: South Country’s Budgets Were Built on Fiction

Editor’s note: This is a follow-up to our inaugural Soap Box column, A $16 Million Hole and Nobody to Blame, which examined the South Country Central School District’s fiscal crisis, the gutting of its teaching staff, and the absence of accountability from district leadership. On April 10, 2026, the New York State Comptroller’s Office released an enhanced budget review that significantly expands the picture.

Five days ago, in the first installment of this column, I asked a question that I thought deserved a straightforward answer: Who is responsible for the financial collapse at the South Country Central School District, and when are they going to answer for it?

Today, the New York State Comptroller’s Office gave us the closest thing to an answer we’ve gotten so far. It isn’t pretty.

What the Comptroller Found

On April 10, 2026, Deputy Comptroller Robin L. Lois released an enhanced budget review of the South Country Central School District, covering the adopted budgets for 2024-25 and 2025-26 and the proposed budget for 2026-27. The review was prompted by the district’s October 2025 disclosure of an unplanned deficit, and by stakeholders, including the 158 residents who petitioned the Comptroller for an independent look, requesting exactly this kind of outside scrutiny.

The headline finding: “significant estimated revenues and expenditures” in both the 2024-25 and 2025-26 adopted budgets “were not reasonable.” That’s the State Comptroller’s office, using the most restrained language available to say the budgets were fiction.

Let me walk through what “not reasonable” looks like in practice, because the specifics matter.

Budgeting by Fantasy

The former Assistant Superintendent for Finance and Management Services, the person who built these budgets, systematically underbudgeted known costs. Not by small margins. Not by honest miscalculations. By hundreds of percent.

Workers’ compensation was budgeted at $200,000 for 2024-25. Actual costs came in at $1.2 million, a 488 percent gap. The district had averaged $766,000 in workers’ comp costs over the two prior years, so there was no mystery about what the real number should have been. The former ASFM apparently budgeted only the difference between estimated costs and a planned reserve draw, a trick that made the budget line look balanced on paper while guaranteeing a shortfall in practice.

Terminal leave payouts and sick leave buybacks were budgeted at $100,000 against actual costs of roughly $1 million, a 932 percent miss. The two-year average was $875,000. Same budgeting trick: lowball the appropriation line, plan to pull from reserves, and hope nobody notices that the fund balance takes the hit from both ends.

Transportation was budgeted at $9.5 million when actual costs hit $10.8 million. The Comptroller’s office noted that transportation contract costs had increased 11.1 percent the prior year. A simple trend calculation would have put the reasonable estimate at $11.1 million. Instead, the district budgeted $1.6 million below that.

BOCES special education services were budgeted at $5.8 million against actual costs of $7 million. The prior year’s actual spending was $6.2 million, and costs had been climbing 42 percent in a single year. The budget went down instead of up.

Personal services were underbudgeted by $1.9 million, including teachers’ salary lines that were set below the amounts required by the district’s own salary schedules. K-3 teacher salaries, in particular, had been partially covered by temporary COVID funds that everyone knew were expiring. The budget didn’t account for their absence.

Security was budgeted at $776,400, or 46.5 percent below the prior year’s actual cost of $1.45 million. Operations overtime was budgeted at roughly half of what it actually cost the year before. These aren’t obscure line items. These are the people keeping the buildings safe and the lights on.

The Number Nobody Saw Coming

In my first column, I focused on the $3.49 million overspend and the $16.2 million year-end gap between revenues and expenditures. Those were the numbers the district had disclosed. What the Comptroller’s review reveals is that the damage didn’t stop there.

The district is now projected to run an operating deficit of approximately $8.7 million for the current 2025-26 fiscal year. Combined with the existing $1.8 million unassigned fund balance deficit carried over from last year, the Comptroller projects a year-end deficit of roughly $10.5 million.

Read that again. After all the cuts, the 53 positions eliminated before the school year started, the mid-year layoffs, the spending freeze that killed field trips and non-essential purchases, the district is still on track to end this year $10.5 million in the red.

How? The same pattern as last year. The 2025-26 budget appropriated $5 million of unassigned fund balance that simply did not exist. The district ended 2024-25 with a negative $1.8 million unassigned balance. The Comptroller states plainly that “the Board and District officials should have known that $5 million of unassigned fund balance was not available” before they adopted the budget. A Treasurer’s report presented to the Board in April 2025 projected an $8.9 million operating deficit for the year. Officials had the information. They adopted the budget anyway.

The 2025-26 budget also drained 100 percent of the teachers’ retirement reserve and more than 54 percent of the workers’ compensation reserve. Once those reserves are gone, they’re gone. Future budgets will need to cover those costs entirely through taxes or further cuts. The Comptroller’s message is blunt: “once these funding sources are used up, new funding sources, such as increases in taxes or cuts in expenditures, are required to balance future budgets.”

Borrowing to Stay Afloat

The proposed 2026-27 budget totals $150.9 million. Estimated revenues, appropriated reserves, and property taxes are not sufficient to cover it. The district says it needs to borrow $6 million through deficit bond anticipation notes to make the numbers work. To issue those notes, the district will need authorization from the State Legislature.

The Comptroller’s warning on this point is worth quoting directly: while borrowing provides short-term relief, it will “further increase the District’s deficit” and the district’s “reliance on borrowing to finance its operating expenditures may cause funding gaps in the future.” In other words, the proposed solution for years of financial mismanagement is to take on debt that will compound the problem. The district is proposing to dig its way out of a hole with a shovel.

The review also flags that BOCES special education costs, which have grown an average of 24.4 percent per year, could come in $2 million over the proposed budget. Terminal leave payouts are budgeted below recent averages. Teachers’ retirement contributions may be underfunded by $400,000. Three collective bargaining agreements expire on June 30, 2026, and the financial impact of those negotiations is unknown. The 2026-27 budget has the same structural weaknesses as the ones that got us here.

The Person Who Left the Room

The Comptroller’s report notes that the former ASFM, who was responsible for developing the 2024-25 and 2025-26 fiscal year budgets, resigned in October 2025, prior to the commencement of our review.” That sentence deserves to sit on its own for a moment.

The person who built the budgets that the State Comptroller has now called unreasonable, who underbudgeted known costs by hundreds of percent, who used a reserve-offset trick that masked shortfalls across multiple line items, left before anyone with state-level authority could ask them a question. The district replaced this person with an acting ASFM, John Belmonte, hired on a consulting contract. Belmonte, to his credit, has been candid about the problems he inherited, telling the community that the approach “should have happened earlier in the school year” and that financial reports to the board were arriving two to three months late.

But candor from a consultant isn’t accountability. The community still doesn’t know the full scope of what went wrong or why, because the forensic audit by Investigative Management Group still hasn’t been completed. The Comptroller’s review and the forensic audit are separate things. One looks at whether the budget numbers were reasonable. The other is supposed to tell us what happened inside the business office, and how. We have the first answer. We’re still waiting on the second.

What This Means for the Budget Vote

The budget vote for 2026-27 is coming up in May. Voters will be asked to approve a spending plan that the State Comptroller’s own office has flagged for potential underbudgeting in multiple categories, which requires $6 million in legislative-approved borrowing to balance, and that follows two consecutive years of budgets the state has called unreasonable.

If voters reject the budget, the district goes to austerity. If they approve it, they’re approving a plan that Albany itself has cautioned may not hold up. Neither option is good. Both are the direct result of years of financial negligence that was allowed to continue unchecked until the state stepped in.

I said in my last column that the students who walked out of Bellport High on March 18 showed more courage than the adults running this district. The Comptroller’s report confirms why they had to. The adults weren’t watching the money. They weren’t following the trends. They weren’t budgeting honestly. And when the wheels came off, the person most directly responsible for building those budgets walked out of the building before anyone could hold them to account.

The Comptroller’s three recommendations to the Board are almost painfully basic: develop a plan to fund operations without relying on one-time revenues, use trend analysis when building budgets, and monitor spending throughout the year instead of making corrections after the money is already gone. These are not sophisticated financial strategies. They are the bare minimum of competent public administration. The fact that the State Comptroller felt the need to put them in writing tells you everything about where this district has been.

The question now isn’t whether the budgets were bad. The state just answered that. The question is whether the people still in the room, the Board, the Superintendent, and the community are willing to demand better. The forensic audit results are still out there. The budget vote is weeks away. The public comment periods are open. If the last few months have proved anything, it’s that nobody is going to fix this quietly, from the inside, without pressure. The residents who petitioned Albany for this review understood that. The kids who walked out in the cold understood it. It’s time the rest of us caught up.

This is the Soap Box. If you have an opinion about what’s happening in our community, we want to hear it. Contact us at MyBellport.com to submit your piece.

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