Don’t tell Nesconset resident Fred Gorman that you can’t beat City Hall — or, in his case, a powerful school board.
Gorman and other opponents of the Sachem Schools budget were successful in voting down the proposed 5% tax increase.
The district is placing the budget up for a revote, but this time where it complies with the tax cap laws and reduces the tax increase down to 1.9%. Gorman was so incensed by the piercing of the cap in a time that districts are awash in federal funding that he expended thousands of dollars of his own money and a great number of man-hours in educating the public as to what was going on.
The tax cap imposed by the state back in 2012 requires schools and local governments to submit budgets that need to be no more than 2% over the previous year’s or the rate of inflation, whichever is lower. (It should be noted, however, that there were a number of exemptions to the cap, including pension, costs and interest on bonds, that allow for the overall rate to often exceed that 2% level.)
In any event, the cap on most districts this year was indeed around 2%, yet some districts such as Sachem and West Babylon sought increases over twice that level. https://paper.newsday.com/html5/reader/production/default.aspx?edid=139bdd15-0e4e-4cf7-a70e-7d834549f987&pnum=8
The question is: Why were many districts able to live within the cap and others were not? Certainly, the level of state aid flowing to each district is a factor, but all these districts had a tremendous influx of federal aid since the pandemic. They should’ve been managing this money wisely. Many of us warned that if they took this money and spent it on recurring expenditures, such as new programs and personnel, they would get caught in the trap of having to come up with more taxes down the road to continue feeding the beast.
So now Sachem is doing some paring down, including the elimination of foreign language classes and a few extra students in their elementary schools.
Somehow, we believe the district will survive. Most of us did not have foreign language courses until middle school at the earliest. Some of us on this editorial board attended parochial schools where we had over 60 children in a class. The children learned anyway because of the high standards and discipline
As the Center for Cost Effective Government stated in its white paper, spending and tax caps work because they force those in power to prioritize.
Some of these districts thought that they could obtain 60% of the vote from the electorate to allow them to pierce the cap. They guessed wrong. People can’t take it anymore. The difference in the original budget and this new budget for some Sachem residents may reach up to $300. That’s significant especially with their other taxes, utility bills and food costs going up.
Somehow, the William Floyd School District stayed within the cap after having reduced everyone’s taxes by $1,000 last year. Why can’t we see more of that?