Outgoing Oakland-area school Superintendent Carl Gartley presents the estimated school budget Tuesday night at Oakland’s budget and advisory meeting. Hannah Kaufman/Morning Sentinel

OAKLAND — Regional School Unit 18 Superintendent Carl Gartley said his newly created position and accompanying $75,000 salary will not come from tax dollars.

Gartley was invited to Oakland Town Council’s budget and advisory meeting Tuesday to present next year’s estimated school budget and answer questions from the town. He quickly addressed rumors that his interim assistant superintendent salary will come out of the school budget.

“There’s zero money for me in this budget for next year,” Gartley told the room. “That’s a popular question.”

Long gray tables of councilors and residents formed a square at the front of the room with Gartley at the center, presenting slides on the estimated budget, opportunities for cost reductions and statistics about the district’s academic performance.

The meeting was livestreamed but did not get recorded, even after requests to the town that budget meetings be recorded for transparency purposes, said Kelly Roderick, an Oakland resident who also sits on the Town Council.

Gartley said that his salaried position to advise the incoming superintendent next year is paid for by contingency funds for one-time expenses. Those include, but are not limited to, transition of leadership, he said.

“We had some grant money — we have lots of grant money over the last five or six years, and we created — the voters passed a contingency fund to deal with one-time expenses,” Gartley said. “There are a variety of things we can do with that, that’s one of them.”

Those expenses would not be used on classroom needs, Gartley said.

“We would never use one-time funds to go back to the classrooms, because then you have to turn around and raise that exact amount,” he said. “You’ve created a fiscal cliff, and that’s just really bad business sense.”

Gartley said that he would never let his salary hit Oakland taxpayers. The school board’s offer to retain him for $75,000 now will save the district money later, he said at the meeting.

“I’m good at budget,” Gartley said. “I’m real good at budget. I’ve saved this district millions of dollars. And I would like to continue to at least advise a little bit on that. Just a half a percent difference would be more than double what they have offered me, so I think it was a good financial deal.”