There wasn’t much press coverage statewide of a recent big decision by the state Senate – all but one of its 62 members voted for a bill to eliminate school property taxes.
What?! Isn’t this a huge deal? School property taxes are the bane of many a homeowner, and the Senate wants to get rid of them. Shouldn’t that be front-page news from Buffalo to Long Island?
It seems many in the Capitol press corps chose to let this story go by because the legislation is what’s known in Albany parlance as a “one-house bill.” That is, it doesn’t have a sponsor in the other house (the Assembly, in this case), and it’s not going anywhere, practically speaking.
The bill would allow voters in individual school districts to vote to eliminate the portion of their property taxes that pays for schools. If a majority of voters agreed (if?!), the school district would be required to reduce the property taxes it collects from homeowners (not businesses, an important exception) by 20% a year over five years, so that eventually homeowners would pay no school property tax.
But school districts would continue to collect the money – from the state. The Senate bill estimates the total cost to the state if every district participated in the optional program (again, if?!) at $9 billion.
Let’s give the senators credit: They got this one in just under the wire. The legislative session concludes June 21, but they were able to complete this important piece of work about a week before that and send it on over to the Assembly, where I’m sure it will be given careful study and a thorough analysis over the next, oh, 5 or 6 days.
In fact, who knows? Perhaps the Republicans who sponsored this bill will put in the extra hours to convince their Democratic colleagues in the Assembly that the 11th hour is the right time to pass such a sweeping change in taxing practice and school funding.
After all, every single Republican in the Senate – that’s 33 of them – is listed as a co-sponsor on the bill. Not one Democrat has his or her name on the bill. They must not care about property taxes, huh?
But wait, all but one Democrat voted for the bill. All but that darn Liz Krueger from Manhattan, who has some kind of hang-up about where the state is going to get the money to fund a takeover of local school costs.
I guess it’s not just the Republicans, clinging to the majority in their house by a mere two seats, who care about our property-tax woes. The Democrats give a hoot, too (no thanks to you, Liz).
The bill would also set up a commission to study property tax reform in New York, freeze property assessments for seniors (with the state once again making up the difference to schools and local governments), and provide financial incentives to local governments encouraging them to reassess property in their jurisdiction every three years to improve accuracy and fair sharing of the burden. In addition, it would require the state to pay for any “mandate” it imposes on schools or local governments that costs them more than $10,000.
I’m sure you know how troublesome those mandates are and how they cause schools and local governments to do all sorts of things they wouldn’t normally do that increase the tax burden (like negotiating generous contracts with unions, testing schoolchildren, and following health and safety guidelines).
The rest of the Senate bill sounds OK, but I’m not sure why you’d bother with it if the Senate succeeds in eliminating our school property taxes. Heck, that’s the lion’s share of my tax bill! If the Senate has figured out how to get somebody else to pay for that (those STATE taxpayers), my problems with the property tax are solved.
June 18th, 2007 at 10:27 am
Much though it’s fun to laugh at the idea of eliminating school taxes, if you’d like to (if?!?!?), there is the very real issue of taxation and representation at stake here.
We already know precious little about what goes on in Albany. Indeed, the unelected Commissioner of Schools sits in Albany and is more directly responsible for taxation through mandate than most citizens of this state are aware. To then say that we’ll go ahead and let our school taxation get determined within the black hole that is Albany is just lunacy.
I’d rather gripe about taxes directly to the people taxing me in a public hearing in my town than be forced to complain fruitlessly on some AM radio talk show because the Albany freight train is now in charge of taxing me.
Besides which, this is political folly from the start. I’m all for funding parity between schools, but we already do not have that in terms of Albany money, so I don’t hold much hope for that situation getting any better once the state pays for ALL our education needs. And on the other side of the coin, do you really think that people spend all that money to raise a family in Brighton so they can get the same schools as everyone else has? Not bloody likely. They’ll be as resistant to their tax money paying for poor districts as those of us interested in regional sovereignty are to it. This was just another stunt of the Three Men in a Room Show, amounting to nothing more.
July 3rd, 2007 at 9:24 am
This proposal seems to have some interesting implications. I’m assuming that most municipalities would opt in. I can’t think of a reason that any city or town hall would want to continue to be the bad guys. I’d need to hear more about that part.
If most municipalities opted in then we would be moving the school tax burden from local property taxes to state taxes (presumably mostly income taxes), then the burden of paying for our schools would fall more equitably around the state (NYS income taxes are slightly more progressive than property taxes).
This is a fundamentally liberal/progressive structural change.
So, what’s going on here? Why would Bruno get on board with that? What’s the hitch?
Does Bruno think that, once the state has control of school taxes, the legislature can start to dismantle the public school system? That would be the page from the conservative playbook although Bruno doesn’t come off as a conservative ideologue. Moreover, it doesn’t look like Bruno hold on power is that strong (two seats switch in the Senate and he’s just another Senator) or that the state is going to move in a direction of dismantling public schools.
July 4th, 2007 at 12:32 am
As little as I believe that this is a real attempt to create an equitable funding structure, this is at least a potential opening salvo – if politicians on both sides of the aisle, in both chambers, have the guts – in the inevitable restructuring of the revenue side of public education in New York.
Residential property valuations bear no relationship to a homeowner’s ability to pay, and that is why reliance upon income taxes, distributed throughout the state and not parceled off by disequitable allocation by school districts, is the only way to proceed in funding what I will casually call the basic education. After state income taxes pay for the essentials, then use property taxes to fund the less necessary parts, or even the frills, that school district voters might want.
But that is only the revenue side.
We desperately need changes on the expense side, and we can no longer afford to treat all expenses, including those for each district’s personnel compensation and benefits, as sacred cows. This shameful canard of “oh, but it’s for the kids” has got to end.
While visiting a board of education meeting in a neighboring school district, which I do with many neighboring districts as a reality check in assessing my own school district, I heard one great comment from one of their residents at budget time: “I hear you (he was addressing the administration and the board) talking about sacrifices by the residents, and sacrifices by the kids, but nobody is talking about sacrifices by the teachers.”
What precious wisdom, that was, from that longtime resident of that district.
Until we get serious about making this an evenhanded process, where all parties sacrifice, we are going to face an ever-growing albatross that will ultimately sink everyone in New York.
The Senate proposal, as disingenuous as it may have been, could hold some promise for a better structure for all citizens of New York, so that people are no longer driven out of their homes, which escalating school taxes makes increasingly likely.