Why New York needs the tax cap

Thomas Hobson was an Englishman who, some 400 years ago, would rent you any horse you wanted -- as long as you took the one nearest the door.

On Tuesday, as in most years, Long Islanders who cast ballots for or against a proposed school budget will be faced with just such a dilemma -- a Hobson's choice. If voters approve a proposed budget, their property taxes will rise an average of 4 percent. If voters reject it, their taxes go up anyway, only a bit less -- and programs get cut.

But this year could be the last in which voters have to take the horse nearest the door. The reason is that, as Hobson himself might have put it, the tax cap cometh. And it's about time.

It's not a sure thing, but there's a good chance that this will be the year. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo made it a centerpiece of his election campaign last year, and in January the State Senate adopted his bill, which would limit annual property tax increases to 2 percent or the rise in the Consumer Price Index (whichever is less), leaving aside capital expenditures such as the cost of new buildings or buses. Voters could override the limit with a 60 percent majority, which is difficult to achieve -- and unlikely to happen without a very good justification.

More to the point as the school election approaches, the bill would require school boards to fall back to the prior year's spending if voters reject a proposed budget and then also reject a second (presumably lower) one offered a month later. In other words, no more of the "contingency" budgets that enable school boards to present voters with a choice worthy of Hobson himself. School budget elections would have real consequences, and this alone should help moderate increases.

If it passes, the cap bill will be particularly welcome after the increases on the school ballot this year from one end of the Island to the other. To make up for cuts in state aid -- and perhaps in anticipation of the coming cap -- proposed school taxes here are rising briskly. Last year, for example, proposed school levies on Long Island rose an average of 3.41 percent. This year the figure is 3.96 percent. Yet because of state aid cuts, Long Island's proposed budgets involve more than 2,000 layoffs -- and in some districts the contingency budget is even higher than the one on the ballot.

A word of caution: If and when a tax cap does pass, Long Island will not magically become a land of efficiently run schools and modest property levies. Nobody is talking about rolling back what are already among the nation's highest property taxes. And tax caps in effect elsewhere have shown themselves to be no panacea. Politicians are expert at finding ways around them, and taxpayers may be dismayed to see just what has to get cut after a few years of tightly capped spending increases.

So property tax caps aren't pretty, and they're not impervious. Indeed, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan) has said he'll propose a version of his own with more exemptions than the governor's bill. That's just the kind of cap we don't need, because it would negate the very purpose of the thing -- which is to encourage cost-control by limiting the ability to tax.

We need such a cap because nothing else seems to work. School spending on Long Island has been soaring for years even as enrollments fell. A cap would force school boards not to approve teacher and administrator contracts mandating unaffordable wage and benefit increases. Local government services are often unduly costly too, and the property taxes paying for these would be capped as well.

For Long Island, the challenge of a property tax cap will be to maintain the strong tradition of educational excellence that prevails in so many communities -- and that can prevail even absent runaway spending, which cannot gallop ahead of inflation indefinitely. A tax cap is simply the legal expression of this reality -- a tool to help school boards, administrators, teachers and parents face the fact that when it comes to property taxes, the sky is no longer the limit.