Although voters in over 95% of New York school districts approved their school budgets on Tuesday, but handful did not. One of those was New Lebanon. Now, for the second year in a row, parents in the Columbia County town of about 2,500 are facing uncertainty.
Blaine Darcy was feeling optimistic going into Tuesday’s vote. The board had presented a budget of just over $16 million. But she knew there was a potential sticking point: the tax levy. By law, districts are allowed to assess a levy - basically, an increase on top of local taxes people are already paying - to fund school budgets.
But the state limits the size of the levy each district can impose. It’s a complex formula that varies by location. New Lebanon’s limit was 4.3%. And for this budget, they were asking for 6%. Still, Darcy and others were hopeful the budget would pass. Last year’s budget had passed with a 9% levy.
Darcy has two daughters, one of whom attends the local elementary school, Walter B. Howard. She’s also president of the PTA. So she’s very invested in the future of the New Lebanon schools. Especially because she’s lived through what she calls the “missteps” of the recent past. "For about 10 years, there was no increase in taxes," she told me. "Now, we're really paying the price."
Darcy says schools need money to cover costs that should’ve been anticipated during that long period with no tax levies. The previous budget - the one with the 9% levy - actually failed on the first vote. The board initially asked for 15%, and voters rejected it. So they revised the levy, and eliminated a bunch of teaching positions, including a reading teacher and a psychologist. It passed on a follow-up vote.
But this year, when the results came in Tuesday, the budget didn’t pass, even though a majority of voters supported it. 58.8% of them voted yes. However, because the levy was above the legal cap, the budget needed a supermajority - 60% - in order to pass. And that 1.2% miss, according to another PTA member named Eileen Raab, was heartbreaking. "In New Lebanon," Raab said, "that's seven votes."
The board now has just under a month to revise the budget and bring it back to voters. But, like last year, when those teaching positions were eliminated to get the budget passed, the stakes are high. Darcy suspects programs like music, art, and athletics might be "on the chopping block."
In addition to being the PTA president, Darcy also runs a business in New Lebanon. And she thinks there was a new wrinkle when it came to this year’s budget debate: the war in Iran, and the inflation and price increases that have come along with it. People are feeling even more stressed about money than normal. "They have no control over the rising gas price, the rising energy costs, the rising food costs. But they do have the ability to say no to their school tax increasing. So they exercise that."
A lot of what happened in New Lebanon, it seems, boils down to this somewhat psychological issue when it comes to taxes.
For instance, in Hudson, where voters did approve the school budget on Tuesday, the proposed tax levy was 5.8% - not so different from the 6% that New Lebanon voters rejected. But there’s a key difference: in Hudson, that 5.8% was at the legal limit for tax hikes - that number the state calculates for each region. In New Lebanon, the 6% was slightly over the state-imposed limit of 4.3.
Both districts were asking voters to pay more taxes - but in New Lebanon, the idea that the levy was, quote, “above the cap,” seems to have turned people off. "I think that verbiage really seems to get people rabble rousing," Darcy said. "It kind of drives the idea that the school is grasping for too much, they're being greedy."
Just to reiterate: a strong majority of voters - 58.8% - voted in favor of the budget in New Lebanon. But because of that pesky verbiage about being “above the cap,” they needed to hit 60% for it to pass. Eileen Raab finds the whole thing sort of obtuse. "The fact that there is this sort of imaginary cap, under which it is legal to raise the taxes, and over which you need something more, is really frustrating."
Also frustrating, Darcy told me, is the fact that this debate has to happen in the first place. "t's a terrible shame that this falls on the local tax community. This should be a state issue. Our school, in particular, gets a little bit of a shaft because of the assessed household values in our area. Unfortunately, our town and district has a lot of second homes assessed at a very high value, which then makes the state think that we are an affluent school district, which is incredibly not the case. So that really hurts us."
The New Lebanon School Board will meet tonight to decide whether to revise the budget.
