The Aspen School District Board of Education certified its 2026 mill levy during a special meeting Wednesday.
The board signed off on a 9.042 mill levy for the district, an increase of nearly two mills from 2025, when the district levied 7.395 mills. It accounts for the voter-approved mill levy override that will bring in an additional $5 million in property tax revenue, and an additional $1.5 million in excess mills that the district can collect because it is locally-funded.
Max Marolt, ASD’s interim chief financial officer, told the board that the district should levy the full amount to maximize its property tax collections.
“The school district’s really in a position where we can’t be leaving any money on the table,” Marolt said.
If the district collects its full mill levy amount, it could potentially use less than the full $95 million bond voters also approved in November. The board is considering collecting the bond in phases, or tranches, to see if it can complete all of its proposed projects without issuing the full bond amount.
The board also certified the school district’s annual audit at the special meeting. For the second year in a row, the district had a clean and timely audit. The district’s audit was delayed in 2022.
“Our financial report is free of all material misstatement,” Marolt said. “What we promised voters through the whole campaign is that it wasn’t a fiscal management issue, it really was funding issues, so we were able to prove that was true.”
In fiscal year 2025, the district had a $263,000 surplus that Marolt said was due to the district’s expense cutting task force that convened last year. The task force was created to identify unnecessary spending, and resulted in a list of recommendations to cut spending, like cutting positions through attrition and minimizing miscellaneous administrative costs.
The $263,000 surplus met Superintendent Tharyn Mulberry’s goal of increasing the district’s fund balance (which decreased 75% in five years) by 10% this past year. It brought the district’s fund balance up to 7.9% of its overall budget. The district could reach the state-recommended 20-30% fund balance in a few years because of smart spending and the district’s sweep at the ballot box in November, Marolt said.
“I really think with the mill levy you all just certified, that’ll really put us in the right direction, and I think we’ll be able to far exceed the little surplus we have this year and make a very meaningful contribution to that reserve,” he said. “Our other goal is to increase employee pay. That’s obviously very important and our fall ballot initiatives gave us the funds in order to do that.”
The district also came in almost $1 million under budget in expenditures, Marolt told the board.
“That really is a testament to that expense-cutting task force,” he said. “As you all know, we were able to work with our union and their representatives and really make a good, collaborative effort at cutting our expenditures.”
The board will make a decision about whether to issue the bond in tranches in early 2026.