Tax Increase On the Table for Sun Prairie?

How come Madison school district, far larger than ours, has already provided the public with a look at what the future holds...but Sun Prairie has not?
Historically, at the 2nd meeting in January, the school board's Finance Committee, chaired by (ahem!) Jim McCourt, has always provided a first look at the budget.  But they're not planning to do that this year.  Why not? Especially when this year we DEFINITELY are in the position of having to finance things that we had money for previously.

Madison schools facing $12.4 million deficit for 2012-13

Last we heard, the district doesn't plan on releasing budget information until late spring.  They are hiding behind last fall's annual meeting FUBAR, but that's just a cover story.  The district doesn't have the greatest news and they want to keep that from the public as long as possible.

And this is just plain wrong.
Instead of the tail wagging the dog, our illustrious school board members need to demand that the district produce at least a preliminary budget report....NOW.  Go ahead...wave your hands, tell us the numbers are only preliminary, but you DO have some idea of what the budget picture looks like.  And you owe it to the community to share it.

We already know (at least those that have been paying attention, that we suffer from some of the problems Madison faces:

Of the $12.4 million deficit, about $3.2 million is tied to disappearing federal stimulus funding for certain positions, such as maintenance and technology workers. The district will have to discuss whether to cut the positions or fund them some other way...

While we have less of a stimulus funds gap than Madison, we still have about $1.1M that will not be available this year.  That means we either need to increase the tax levy, or make some hard decisions about cutting things we added due to stimulus dollars.  And therein lies the whole problem with the stimulus packages.  At some point the cord was going to be cut, and how does a district fund it once the funds dry up?

Really, it sure looks like there is no question that we will have a [yet another] tax increase.  The only question is, how large will it be?