A bond refinancing could save Lehighton Area School District about $619,000 over the next 20 years, according to a presentation by Public Financial Management at Monday night’s school board workshop.

Brad Remig, PFM managing director, said the refinancing opportunities include the Series of 2015 and Series A of 2015 bonds.

“Though there has been a lot of recent uncertainty in the markets, especially with what we’re seeing happen in Ukraine, we’re still seeing very low interest rates,” Remig said.

A lot of the projected savings would be on the front end, including an estimated $304,311 in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2023, and 166,569 in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2024.

Refinancing, according to Remig, would mean Lehighton would be lowering its interest rate from an average of 3.24% on the Series of 2015 bonds and 4.86% on the Series A of 2015 bonds, but not extending out the final maturity date.

It is a different scenario from the restructuring proposal that Lehighton shot down last year. Under that plan, the district would have received a short-term cash flow of $1.88 million in the 2021-22 fiscal year and $1.24 million in the 2022-23 fiscal year in exchange for a $2.69 million added cost by the time the bonds fell off after 2044.

“This looks a lot better than what we saw last year,” Director Barbara Bowes said.

Since Monday night’s meeting was a workshop, Lehighton took no action, but could vote at its March 28 to give PFM authorization to proceed with drafting a parameters resolution that would set bench marks for the savings the district would hope to realize.

“There is no cost to the district for that,” Remig said on Monday. “This would allow the district the flexibility to execute the refunding quickly and efficiently when the market conditions stabilize and produce a favorable net savings amount.”

Even if the district adopts a parameters resolution, if the market is unfavorable, action to refinance does not have to occur.

“It is very difficult to tell where the market will be six months from now,” Remig said. “The situation in Ukraine is driving a lot of the interest rate markets. We don’t know where the end is.”

Under the timeline proposed Monday night, settlement would not occur any earlier than June for the 2015A bond refinancing and August for the 2015 bond refinancing.

“We refinanced a considerable amount of times over my 12 years at Whitehall and we always saw a savings,” Jack Corby, acting superintendent, said. “Things were always as presented and accurate.”