Private sector hails plan for school tax cap

Westchester County's leading business groups strongly back a rap on school property taxes proposed this month by New York state's governor and a state tax relief commission. But the proposal, called a first step in relieving New York property owners of the highest tax burden in the nation, has failed to gain steam among Albany lawmakers closing out their legislative session and has aroused powerful opposition in the state teachers union and a broad coalition claiming to represent 1 million New Yorkers.

Looking to muster grassroots support for his proposal to cap annual hikes in school property-tax levies at 4 percent, or 120 percent of the Consumer Price Index, whichever is less, Gov. David Paterson recently appeared in Dobbs Ferry at the home of Bill and Adrienne Flynn. The Flynns, an IBM sales manager and a homemaker, respectively, have two sons in the Dobbs Ferry public school system and pay about 10 percent of their household income in property taxes. Joining Paterson at the governor's portable lectern in the Flynns' driveway at 40 Ogden Ave. was Nassau County Executive Thomas B. Saozzi, chairman of the state Commission on Property 'fax Relief appointed in January by former Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

Paterson's tax-cap proposal was the chief recommendation in the commission's recently released preliminary report. With the 4 percent cap in place, according to its proponents, the average homeowner in the Dobbs Ferry school district would have paid a total of $8,657 in property taxes in the 2007-2008 year, a savings of $2,235 from the average total of $10,892 without the cap.

"People like the Flynns just can't take this anymore," Suozzi said. With local taxes in the state 79 percent above the national average, "It's not just a local problem. It's a systemic, statewide problem."

Paterson noted that 28 percent of college graduates in New York leave the state. "People are voting with their feet," he said, and worried that middle-class couples like the Flynns would join that exodus to states with lighter tax burdens. Labor unions opposing the cap should realize "that businesses are leering the state because they don't have any way to conduct their business because even the taxes on them are too high," Paterson said.

The governor's host, Bill Flynn, said he liked "the idea of a cap because it instills discipline in the system." But he warned that unfunded state education mandates put pressure on a spending cap for a local school district.

Flynn said Paterson assured him the cap would not degrade the quality of education. Opponents last week argued the spending restrictions would do just that, pointing to the example of educational decline in other cap-imposing states such as Massachusetts - the same state that Suozzi said ranks first in the nation in student test scores while dropping to 33rd among states in property tax levels since imposing a school tax cap.

The governor's proposal, unlike the commission's recommendation, gives school district residents the right to vote every year on a school budget even if the levy increase is less than 4 percent. As recommended by the commission, it requires at least 55 percent of voters to approve any tax levy over the cap, and a 60 percent voting majority if the over-cap school district receives a state aid increase of 5 percent or more. Any unused portion of the levy cap may be "banked" by a district and used in future years at a rate not exceeding 1.5 percent of the prior year's levy.

Those local allowances, however, failed to win grassroots support for the governor's proposal last week at a tax-relief forum in Putnam Valley sponsored by Assemblywoman Sandy Galef, D-Ossining. Galef, sponsor of an Assembly bill that would set a state-funded "circuit breaker" on individual property tax payments based on household income, led the session with Suozzi.

The Suozzi-led commission supports Games circuit-breaker proposal as a replacement for the STAR rebate program for school taxpayers, which both Paterson and the commission said has been ineffective in controlling property tax growth. The commission recommended redirecting at least $2 billion from STAR to a circuit-breaker program once the school tax cap is in place. "I didn't hear a lot of support" for the governor's proposal, Galef said. Among speakers at the forum, which included school board members, educators and homeowners, "I'd say the majority had all kinds of concerns."

"I generally support their goal," Galef said of the governor's and commission's tax-relief proposal. But to persuade the state Assembly and Senate to vote for a cap. "We've got to get some grassroots sup-port out there," she said. "It's going to be difficult."

Galef suggested the spending cap could be tried and evaluated as a five-year pilot program. "But I do think when you have a cap, you have to do mandate reform" at the state level, as the commission also recommends.

Another member of Westchester's legislative delegation in Albany, Assemblyman Adam Bradley, D-White Plains, last week called the governor's hastily issued proposal "a knee-jerk political Band-Aid" applied to "a very complicated issue" that requires "thoughtful public-policy discussion and candor." By setting a cap on school property taxes without making exemptions for things that are totally above and beyond the control of a school district," such as rising fuel costs, "all we're really doing is hurting children," he said.