DISPATCHES by Hank Kalet: Municipal and school officials are waiting to know what rules they’ll have to follow before crafting their budgets. The rest of us are waiting for tax reform.
By: Hank Kalet
School officials are feeling a bit pessimistic.
With a state budget still in the red thanks to years of questionable policies and smoke-and-mirror accounting, the people drafting school district budgets are not counting on the state for a lot of help.
Most are assuming that state aid will remain at the 2006 level the same level received by local school districts since the early days of the McGreevey administration.
And most are waiting to see if the rules of the game will change if Gov. Jon Corzine will sign legislation approved by the state Legislature imposing a 4 percent cap on property tax levies that will carry far fewer exemptions than the rather porous cap that currently is in place.
"The biggest problem we have is, what do they really mean by 4 percent," Cranbury School Business Administrator Carolyn Eversole said last week. "It’s very hard to build a budget when you don’t know what amounts you’re allowed and in what parameters."
South Brunswick, however, is preparing for the worst and is approaching the budget this year with what can only be described as a bunker mentality. The district’s philosophy this year will focus on preservation of basic needs, Superintendent Gary McCartney told a Budget Committee meeting earlier this month. In recent years, the district used a "need to have vs. nice to have" paradigm in judging spending requests. This year, he said, the district will focus on "what can we preserve."
Some answers might be forthcoming today (Thursday), when Gov. Corzine makes his annual budget speech to the state Legislature. While the governor has said little about the budget, The Asbury Park Press is reporting that the state’s 611 school districts could see a boost of up to $300 million for the 2007-2008 school year.
That’s not a lot of money it works out to an average of about a half million per school district and it remains to be seen how much will make its way to towns like South Brunswick. Last year’s budget, for instance, included a $164 million increase in total state aid to schools, but South Brunswick had to make due with the same aid it had received in 2005-2006.
The nominal increase expected this year about 4 percent is just another in a long line of examples of the failure of a state tax reform project that has resulted in unsustainable tax credits and little else.
It has been seven months since the government shutdown that triggered a special joint session of the state Legislature that had as its specific charge the reform of state and local governments. It has been three months since the special committees issued a total of 98 recommendations on how to fix what’s broken.
And yet, we are still working under the constraints of an archaic tax system that places too much of a burden on local school districts and governments to fund services.
The state, for instance, pays about 44 percent of the cost of educating the average student the highest on record, according to the state Treasury Department with most of the actual money going to the poorer school districts who obviously need it most.
But that leaves districts such as Cranbury, South Brunswick and Monroe all relatively well off to pay their own way. State aid offsets about a fifth of South Brunswick’s school budget, while just 6 percent of Cranbury’s is covered by the state.
Education, however, should not be a local responsibility. The state’s courts have repeatedly ruled that the state’s school-funding system perpetuates disparities between poorer and richer districts, leading to unequal educational opportunities.
The remedies, however, have not fixed the problems. Funneling money to poorer urban districts has had a nominal educational effect, while fostering resentment in the suburbs. School taxes make up between half and two-thirds of the average property tax bill, meaning that an average taxpayer is paying between $3,000 and $4,000 in school taxes, depending on where he or she lives.
The 98 recommendations made by the joint legislative committees were unlikely to change this much and that was before they were watered down or killed outright.
If we were truly interested in changing the rules, we’d put real reform on the table forced consolidation of smaller districts and municipalities, reducing the number of government units in the state, and the dismantling of the property tax system and its replacement with an expanded, broad-based income tax.
But then, I’m not sure anyone is interested in anything more than a tax cut.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. E-mail him by clicking here. His blog, Channel Surfing, can be found at www.kaletblog.com.

