Samson - read this and educate yourself.
________________________
_____________
Why Are Our Taxes So #%*! High?
www.westchestermagazine. com________________________
_______________
Paid enough taxes lately? Ask anyone who lives in Westchester, and the answer is obvious. With a mix of outrage, awe, and even a hint of perverse pride, they’ll tell you our taxes are the highest in the whole U.S. of A.! Why does Westchester pay more for schools, police protection, garbage collection, and other services financed by our tax dollars? The answers may infuriate you—even more.
By: Dave Donelson
delaide DiGiorgi, a 73-year-old retired realtor in Tuckahoe and president of the Westchester League of Women Voters, isn’t pleased, either. “I took early retirement in the mid-nineties, and since then our taxes have tripled. All I can say is, we can’t take it anymore.”
Can’t take what?
The highest taxes in the nation, that’s what. “High” is a relative term, of course, but if the national average tax bill were as tall as a center hall Colonial in Scarsdale, Westchester’s would be the height of the Ritz-Carlton Tower. Even realtor Charlene Tobin, who sells many multi-million-dollar homes in Purchase, was taken aback by one that came on the market recently with a $117,989 tax bill. As she pointed out, “You have to earn at least $235,000 a year just to pay the taxes on the house!”According to the Tax Foundation, a Washington, DC-based research group, we Westchester taxpayers who live in our own homes do indeed write the largest property tax check in the country—yes the country: $8,404, or nearly five(!) times the national average of $1,854. Part of that is due to the value of our homes, but they are only three times the national average. It’s the tax rates that are killing us.
Taxes are driving us away, too. “It’s ridiculous!” exclaims 64-year-old Rick Klett, who moved to Massachusetts in 2008. “If I had stayed in New Rochelle, almost my entire pension would have been eaten up by my real estate taxes!” Klett retired from a job with the Irvington School District and didn’t want to leave. “My wife was born and raised in New Rochelle, but we were being taxed out of existence.” In 1997, the couple bought a home on Interlaken Avenue in New Rochelle. The taxes were about $7,000 at the time. By the time they sold it 11 years later, the tax bill was $16,000. Today, they own a larger home (1,860 sq. ft. vs. 1,730 sq. ft.) on a much larger lot (one acre-plus as opposed to 60 x 110 feet)—a waterfront lot, no less, about 12 miles south of Boston—and pay $5,200 in taxes.
Of course, there are those who say our cost of living—not to mention our quality of life—is substantially higher than in the rest of the nation. But even among comparable places, particularly those in the New York metropolitan area, we still have the dubious distinction of topping the tax charts. Nassau County is close at $8,306, Rockland is $7,798, Putnam is $6,917, and Suffolk is $6,842. Bergen County, New Jersey—just across the river—is $7,997, while Fairfield, Connecticut, is $6,051. Tax-wise, it’s cheaper to live in Greenwich than in Mamaroneck.
Westchester tax bills become even more ludicrous when we compare them to other counties in the U.S., places that are similar to us in population, cost of living, proximity to major cities, housing values, and so forth. Like Middlesex County, Massachusetts, part of the Boston metro, which is somewhat more populous and a little less prosperous, but where county government was abolished in 1997. The average property tax bill there is about half of ours: $4,271. Or San Mateo County, California (next to San Francisco), where the cost of living is among the highest in the nation, yet the average property tax paid by a homeowner is just $4,208. Or Fairfax County, Virginia, which is very similar to Westchester, except it spends a billion dollars less than we do on its schools and the average property tax bill is $4,616.
High taxes are undermining the Westchester economy, according to Al DelBello, former New York Lieutenant Governor, Westchester County Executive, and Mayor of Yonkers. “It’s devastating to business. It’s not that they can’t pay the property tax; it’s that they can’t afford to hire people who live in the County. If you were a company trying to find a location for a new office or distribution center, why would you come to the highest taxed county in the United States?”
Why, exactly, do we have that honor?
As DiGiorgi says, “We want what we want.” Which means? “For many, many years, people wanted all those extra special kinds of benefits that the government took care of.” That’s the heart of the debate over Westchester taxes. We hate them, but we can’t seem to stop the spending that drives them up. Our property taxes, you see, are determined by a not-very-complex formula based on how much money our schools, village, town, county, and special taxing district(s) spend. According to the New York State Office of Real Property Services, the formula is pretty simple: the taxing body (schools, town, etc.) estimates its expenses, subtracts income like state and federal aid, sales taxes, and fees, and divides the remaining expenses over the property tax base. Shortly thereafter, our tax bill arrives and the screaming begins.
Something to keep in mind is that a couple of things other than expenses by our schools and town government affect our tax bills. While the property tax represents the largest single source of their funding, it’s only slightly more than half. If there is a cutback in state aid (highly likely these days) or sales tax receipts fall off (you heard about the recession, right?), the shortfall is made up on our property tax bill.
What’s more, if someone else in our community gets his or her taxes reduced through the appeals process known as tax certiorari, we have to make up the difference. Harrison School Superintendent Louis Wool reports, for example, that the Harrison School District is facing $23 million in tax assessment challenges, mostly from commercial property owners, and he expects about one-third of them to go
into effect. One was filed by Westchester Country Club, which recently was awarded a $2.6 million reduction. Since I live in Harrison, I’ll have to pay my share of that unless the town and school district cut expenses to offset it. I’m not holding my breath.
My town and school district, like most, have been nibbling around the edges of their spending. But the biggest portion of our tax dollars go to pay for the people who clean our streets, put out our fires, and educate our children—and the layers of management we think they need. As Greenburgh Town Supervisor Paul Feiner says, “Local government is a service provider just like a plumber or an electrician, and people have to decide whether they want to pay for particular services. But people want to have their cake, eat it, and not pay for it.”
There are an awful lot of people supplying services to—and paid by—the taxpayers of Westchester. Schools receive the lion’s share of our property taxes, about 60 percent of the total, depending on where you live. The County government splits the remainder more or less equally with the towns, villages, and municipalities, according to the New York State Comptroller. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says our local governments employ nearly 19,000 people, while our schools have nearly 24,000 people on staff. We can rant about the cost of fuel to operate our school buses and rave about saving two dollars a ton on rock salt for our roads, but the greatest share—about 70 percent—of our tax dollar goes for employee salaries and benefits.
Are we happy with the services they provide in return for that big check we write? Even the most adamant tax opponent, like Tea Party participant Howard Hellwinkel, a 58-year-old small-business owner in North Salem, isn’t griping about the value he gets for his tax dollar. “As far as our town goes, I’m satisfied,” he says. “We have garbage service, our roads are maintained very well, and we have an excellent school district. Whether we pay more than we should has to do with costs and how they’re managed.”
We must worship our kids.
In the 2008 fiscal year, the average Westchester school district spent $24,000 per pupil, or way more than double the national average of about $10,000, as reported by the Census Bureau. There’s no question that our schools are good, but are they twice as good as everyone else’s?Westchester apparently knows no bounds when it comes to spending on our schools. Last spring, about six months after the U.S. economy barely avoided falling into the abyss, voters in Westchester approved every single school budget, 37 of which included a tax increase. This year’s results weren’t known at press time, but we can be pretty sure that most of them passed again.
We don’t seem to care much about the details. The formula “good schools equal high home prices” might as well be tattooed on the forehead of every realtor in the County. Good schools cost a lot, we believe, and so we pay the bill. The question lingers, though: What exactly are we paying for?
Mostly, we’re paying for people. Teachers (about 13,000 of them), plus administrators, nurses, janitors, school bus drivers, band directors, guidance counselors, psychologists, secretaries, business managers, basketball coaches, and more—many, many more. All told, we spend about $3.5 billion on our schools, according to the New York State Comptroller, and more than two-thirds of that goes for salaries and benefits. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says we paid school employees more than $2 billion in 2008. Benefits added another $680 million to the bill.
There are other major expenses, too, of course. Debt service in 2008 was $192 million and bussing cost $163 million, and plenty was spent on computers, football helmets, and big red pencils, but the overriding cost of getting our kids into an Ivy League college lies in the people we hire to do it.
Good schools don’t have to cost a lot, though. Residents of Fairfax County, Virginia, send their kids to schools that were operated for $2.2 billion in 2008, the same year we spent $1.3 billion more—to educate fewer kids. Oh, as mentioned earlier, Fairfax residents’ average property tax bill is $4,600, or about half of ours. Other than that, the two counties are remarkably similar. Fairfax is a suburb of a major city (Washington, DC); has 1,010,000 people (versus our 950,000); a median household income of $126,000 (against our $111,000); and an average home value of $556,000 (ours is $582,000). The cost of living is comparable, too. Their schools had 165,000 pupils in 2008; we had 145,000. Excluding debt service, we spent $24,000 to educate each of ours—Fairfax spent $13,000.
Yes, but Westchester schools are nationally known. They have stellar reputations. What college admissions officer hasn’t heard of Scarsdale High? Or Horace Greeley? Or Edgemont High? But…hold on…so are Fairfax County schools. By most standards, their academic achievements were just as good as ours, if not better. Fairfax students in the class of 2008 had an average combined SAT score of 1654. This year, the average high school in Westchester scored 1598. The four-year graduation rate was the same for both counties: 91 percent, and about the same percentage of students went on to college: 93 percent for Fairfax, 94 percent for Westchester. On the June 2009, Newsweek magazine list of America’s Top High Schools, Fairfax had 11 schools in the top 200, while Westchester had eight. So what accounts for the difference in the cost of the schools?
For one thing, Westchester’s 13,000 teachers belong to New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), while non-teaching support personnel are members of Local 1000 of the Civil Service Employees Association. Virginia is a right-to-work state where unions aren’t a big factor. The pay scales reflect it, too.
In Katonah, for example, beginning teachers earn $52,000, whereas those at the top of the scale make $138,000. In Fairfax, it’s $47,000 to $99,000. When you multiply it times the number of teachers in Westchester, the difference hits your tax bill like a Big Mac hits your waistline.
