JAY – It looks like the town meeting date of April 23 will have to be changed because the state is not releasing its preliminary general purpose aid funding figures for school systems until Wednesday.

It all comes down to a time crunch.

School and Budget committee members have not voted on the warrant articles for the town meeting referendum and cannot do so until the Maine Department of Education releases those figures to factor into the 2007-08 budget, school Superintendent Robert Wall said.

Even if the figures are released today, Wall said, he doesn’t know what the figures will be.

“It doesn’t look like we’ll be able to meet the time frame,” he said. “We’ll explore with the town manager after conferring with the School Committee where we’ll go from there.”

“If we do not have the figures for the final warrant so it can be posted on March 2, the town meeting date will have to be changed because everything has to be timed for a legal posting time,” Town Manager Ruth Marden said. “We do have to be a little flexible. I do want to point out that this is not a town of Jay problem. We were supposed to have these figures by the first part of February and here it is in the first part of March and the state is really failing us.”

Marden checked the DOE Web site Tuesday morning and the figures were not listed.

“We’re trying to run a tight ship and we have to abide by state and local laws and we’re not able to keep our deadline because the state is not complying with their own laws,” Marden said.

By state law, the Department of Education has until Feb. 1 to tell individual school systems how much money they’re going to get for education in the upcoming year. The funding numbers are late because some school system submitted incorrect or late data, which slowed down the process, and there were a lot more variables unknown because of the governor’s proposal for consolidating school districts and superintendents from 152 to 26.

The plan is to release the preliminary general purpose aid for school systems on Wednesday, state education spokesman David Connerty-Marin said Tuesday.

The town still plans to hold its informational night at 7 p.m. Thursday at the middle school to discuss the town’s proposed $5.8 million budget, which includes $2.2 million in revenues. School officials also plan to be there to talk about its draft $9.96 million budget.

However, due to the school’s warrant articles not being finalized, Marden said, they cannot be posted for the scheduled March 12 public hearing and that will throw off the time frame leading to the April 23 meeting.

The hearing needs to be posted seven business days prior to the meeting, she said. Absentee ballots need to be available 30 days prior to the referendum.

“I cannot even project when the public hearing and the town meeting will be,” she said.

Selectmen authorized Marden and Town Clerk Ronda Palmer Monday to start the process to develop a new time table for the town referendum without calling a special selectmen’s meeting.

Palmer said she has been advised that the nomination papers for school and town positions will still be good if a new meeting date is required.

The town holds its town meeting referendum in April so that if an article fails, another referendum can be scheduled before July 1, the beginning of the next fiscal year.