Any school tax cap must have teeth

Andrea Vecchio is an activist with the East Islip TaxPAC and Long Islanders for Educational Reform.

For years, taxpayers have voted against school budgets carefully rigged to ensure a "yes" result. Now Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has advised taxpayers to hang in there because "help is on the way."

The governor is proposing a cap limiting property tax increases to 2 percent. The right tax cap can do what the budget vote no longer can: control taxes and get spending back to a level that district taxpayers can afford. But we can't let this cap become another phony Albany reform.

There is no lack of funding in our schools. On Long Island, an ordinary public school district like East Islip spends $23,000 a year to educate one child, while an exceptional parochial high school spends a fraction of that. Something is wrong.

But details are lacking in Cuomo's plan. Some reports based on other earlier proposals suggest voters will be able to override a cap through a majority vote. That's not the kind of tax cap we need to rein in school taxes. The governor says he favors a hard cap without exclusions - but we need to know how and if it will work.

Cutting school taxes is particularly critical to our future on Long Island, where property owners bear among the heaviest tax burdens anywhere. But if experience is any guide, the public education system will resist any proposals to cap school taxes and will block or render ineffective all such legislation that is proposed. Too many legislators beholden to these special interests are unwilling to vote on behalf of taxpayers.

The idea of a tax cap has a rocky history in New York. In 1997, Gov. George Pataki proposed STAR cap and tax abatement legislation. Though well-intentioned, the essential tax cap was gutted from the bill by the legislature, replaced by an easily manipulated school budget cap that kicks in only after two defeats by voters. STAR without the tax cap ended up a hugely expensive program that did little to accomplish property tax reform. It has now become part of the problem, adding billions to the present state deficit.

In 2007, Gov. Eliot Spitzer formed the New York State Commission on Property Tax Relief, appointing Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi as its chairman. Taxpayer advocacy groups all over the state were encouraged. My own group, Long Islanders for Educational Reform, testified in favor of a cap at numerous hearings.

The commission's final report was submitted to Gov. David A. Paterson in June 2008. It recommended first a cap on the property-owners' tax levy, followed by other essential reforms. But the tax cap was declared dead on arrival by the state teachers union, and seemingly as a result, it was: Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver refused to allow his members to vote on it.

A 2009 version of the tax cap bill had an exclusion for pension costs, rendering it unsupportable. In 2010, the cap proposal was unfortunately reworked again to include all taxing districts. Language was added to permit "governing boards" to present cap overrides for a public vote. A true tax cap has so far been dead even before its arrival.

What Long Island needs is a solid tax cap with no exclusions. A cap that can be overridden as easily as budgets get approved is as useless as the current school vote.

The cap itself is just the beginning. Laws must be changed for it to work. There needs to be a real spending freeze, including for personnel costs, on all school districts. We need existing state law given teeth to force truthful budget presentations. That way, taxpayers will have the power to decide for themselves whether to spend more for their districts' schools, and the ability to base that decision on facts - not deceptive presentations calculated to keep the money flowing for raises, perks and benefits. We need to put an end to the districts' parent-extortion games, which threaten to cut all the favored programs to force a yes vote.

For reforms to be meaningful, New York State will have to end mandatory step raises after contracts expire, and end the contract abuses that allow pension padding, sick-day paybacks, and the like.

Public financing of education must return to basics. Taxpayers want to support a sound basic education for every child - but beyond that, everything else should be on the table.