School votes are not a happy occasion

School officials are concluding that with 90 percent of budgets passing, there is no need for a tax cap ["LI on school budgets: Yes!" News, May 18]. Who are we kidding? Did they look at the margin by which many budgets passed? There is clearly a message to be heard, and school officials should start listening.

Robert Biancardi, Valley Stream
 

Voting on the school budget is a farce if a "no" vote only affects the extra programs for the kids like sports, which represent a small fraction of the budget.

Homeowners and taxpayers should be able to vote on teacher salaries and benefits, which is the largest part of the budget. This is already decided by union contract. This is a secret process we are locked out of.

Why don't they call it what it is? The taxpayer gets to vote on kids sports, and here is the bill for teachers salaries -- like it or not!

Michael Houlihan, Islip Terrace
 

I disagree with teachers union president Richard Iannuzzi's opinion on a tax cap ["Tax cap would block local school control," Letters, May 16]. He states that a 2 percent tax cap would hurt the school system, but the average budget increase in Nassau and Suffolk this year was 2.17 percent. This has not been the case for many, many years.

When budgets were defeated, the austerity budget was almost equal to the submitted budget. The increases were more like 6 percent to 7 percent. With a 2 percent cap, the schools over that would have to bring their costs in line.

A tax cap would allow the young people as well as the old to continue living on Long Island by stabilizing their expenditures.

Donald Tuohy, West Islip
 

One should not consider the number of budgets that were approved as an indication of voter support for higher school district spending. The budget vote is rigged and indicative of nothing. Years of skillfully crafted budget blackmail to suppress a negative vote have succeeded in making the school vote virtually meaningless.

This year's budget vote fiasco confirms the absolute necessity of passing a hard school tax cap because voters can no longer control the amount of their own property tax burden by voting "no." The scheme was to force many of us to pay a higher tax if we voted no.

Many districts have figured out that by withholding reserves (our own unspent tax money) from a contingency budget, but applying those same reserves to the budget they want passed, they can tax us more for voting no. They can tax us more for less. This is budget blackmail. As a result, most potential "no" voters simply give up and don't vote at all.

An extreme example was Middle Country School District, where a "yes" vote carried a 7 percent tax hike, and a "no" vote would have cost taxpayers a whopping 21 percent more.

Where are our legislators while the holy grail of democracy -- the right to vote as we choose -- is trashed by our esteemed educators? We need legislation passed to stop the misuse of reserves to skew the vote in favor of a higher-spending budget.

It is our hope that when adopted, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's tax cap should help end this blackmail through the bill's elimination of the contingent budget.

Andrea Vecchio, East Islip

Editor's note: The writer is an activist with the East Islip TaxPAC and Long Islanders for Educational Reform.