LI School Tax - Educational Excellence and Fiscal Responsibility

ASSEMBLYMAN MURRAY UNVEILS EDUCATION REFORM PLAN

Four Point Plan Reduces Spending, Caps Taxes, Calls for Mandate Relief

Assemblyman Dean Murray today announced his four-point Education Reform Plan to rein in costs and make public education in New York more affordable, while protecting educational opportunities for students and preventing teacher layoffs. Assemblyman Murray distributed his plan at the meeting of Long Islanders for Education Reform at the Huntington Hilton.

“New York is facing one of the worst fiscal crises in our history, with declining revenue, increasing costs, a staggering tax burden on our residents, and a growing deficit that must be tackled without using one-shot gimmicks. And nowhere is this more apparent than in our education system,” said Assemblyman Murray. “Parents, taxpayers and educators alike are being forced to decide between the horrible choices of cuts to programs, layoffs, or staggering tax increases to pay for the increasing cost of our schools. We need a better plan. We need to look at this problem in a different light, instead of using the same ‘solutions’ that have gotten us into this mess.”

The Murray Education Reform Plan focuses on ways to reduce spending and relieve the burden on taxpayers, rather than taking a one-sided approach of simply trying to come up with new ways to raise revenue through taxes. The four points of the plan include:

•   Across the board pay freezes for school employees;
•   An early retirement incentive for certain school employees who have
worked for a minimum of 25 years and have reached the age of 55;
•   A School Tax Property Cap; and
•   Real Mandate Relief, by eliminating existing unaffordable mandates.

“Private businesses know that when the economy falters, you can’t just sharply increase prices – or you’ll lose your customers. And you can’t just layoff employees and cut your expenses to the bone, because you’ll end up putting out an inferior product. You have to look at the problem – and your business – as a whole, with a little belt tightening, smarter decisions, and doing without some of the things you became accustomed to when business was booming,” Murray said. “There’s no one single solution to this problem. There will have to be a lot of give and take from everyone involved.”

A copy of the plan is below.

The Murray Education Reform Plan

New York is facing one of the worst fiscal crises in our history, with declining revenue, increasing costs, a staggering tax burden on our residents, and a growing deficit that must be tackled without using one-shot gimmicks. And no where is this more apparent than in our education system. Parents, taxpayers and educators alike are being forced to decide among the horrible choices of cuts to programs, layoffs, or staggering tax increases to pay for the increasing cost of our schools.

When we say the money is simply not there, that is no joke. Rather than taking a one-sided approach of simply trying to come up with new and innovative ways to raise revenue… we need to be looking at ways that we can reduce spending and relieve the burden to the taxpayers. Those “inventive” ways of raising revenue, are nothing more than tax increases.

We need a better plan. We need to look at this problem in a different light, instead of using the same “solutions” that have gotten us into this mess. Private businesses know that when the economy falters, you can’t just sharply increase your prices – or you’ll lose your customers. And you can’t just layoff employees and cut your expenses to the bone, because you’ll end up putting out an inferior product. You have to look at the problem – and your business – as a whole, with a little belt tightening, smarter decisions, and doing without some of the things you became accustomed to when business was booming.

There is no one single solution to this problem. There will have to be a lot of give and take from everyone involved.

1) Across the Board Pay Freeze. We need to ask all school employees – including teachers, administrators and support staff – to support a one year pay freeze across the state. It is estimated that we can save roughly three quarters of a billion dollars with a statewide teachers pay freeze. Keep in mind that we are not asking for pay cuts… simply a freeze of salaries for one year. While the teachers’ unions have come up with a list of ways to generate more revenue, they have to realize that simply raising more money so that we can spend more money is not the answer.

2) Early Retirement Incentive. While teachers and administrators will be doing their part by foregoing pay raises, the state needs to do its part to help. That’s why I am calling for the implementation of the 55/25 early retirement incentive program. This would be a temporary retirement incentive for certain public employees at or above age 55 with a minimum of 25 years of service to be allowed to retire early without any retirement benefit reductions. This would allow us to remove some of the highest paid employees from the payroll, while replacing some of them with new workers who would be paid lower salaries and would be part of the new Tier 5 retirement program – reducing pension costs. By doing this and working more efficiently, we could reduce the workforce by nearly eight percent, thus reducing the salary portion of the budgets dramatically. Through this plan, we would not have to layoff teachers and would in fact be adding new teachers who otherwise cannot find work.

This step would not only help immediately, but would also save billions down the road. All of the new teachers that would be hired would fall into the Tier 5 retirement system. They would not be fully vested until they had 10 full years in the system (unlike before when only five years was needed). The new Tier 5 also limits the amount of overtime that can be used in the calculation of a final average salary to 15 percent of regular annual wage, thus curbing the practice commonly referred to as “pension spiking”. Tier 5 also raises the age that teachers would be eligible for full retirement credit from 55 to 57. It also has employees contributing three percent of their salary toward their pension for the entirety of their employment, rather than just the first 10 years.

3) School Property Tax Cap. We need to cap the school portions of property taxes at four percent or 120 percent of the rate of inflation, whichever is less. This would force both the school boards and the unions to be cognizant of the limits of their spending.

4) Mandate Relief. We cannot impose a tax cap without also providing some mandate relief to the local school districts. A tax cap without mandate relief would box our school districts into a financial corner, which in the short term, could result in drastic cuts to programs for the children. In addition, we must put a moratorium on new mandates to school districts unless the funding comes with it. We should also put together regional panels made up of PTA members, school board members and business leaders to determine what existing mandates can be eliminated, and determine if there are better ways to fund some of the necessary existing mandates.