What Happened to The Big School Tax Increase in Greece?
I was so busy looking for pictures of “Kristen” that I didn’t get a chance to get to this yesterday. The D&C reported that the Greece School District was proposing a 1.67% tax increase. That’s well below the rate of inflation.
What happened to the tax increase of 6 or 7% that all of the Democratic activist and “concerned community members” were promising as a result of the FAIR plan? According to the D&C:
His budget calls for a tax rate increase of about 1.67 percent and an increase in the tax levy of 1.97 percent.
“This budget addresses our needs for next year and is very responsible to taxpayers,” Achramovitch said.
The proposal calls for adding more than 25 positions, including elementary reading and special-education teachers, teaching assistants and nurses. Eighteen other positions would be cut.
School systems this year are coping with budget fallout from Monroe County Executive Maggie Brooks’ “F.A.I.R.” tax intercept plan, which trades county sales tax revenue for a state takeover of local Medicaid costs. Under F.A.I.R., the county slashed sales tax revenue it historically shared with schools by 50 percent. In Greece, that would result in a loss of more than $4.6 million in revenue for 2008-09.
The district was able to absorb most of that loss with this year’s surplus funds.
And this is with Client Number 9’s proposal to shift promised school aid from Monroe County to New York City.
How in the world could they add positions and keep the rate increase below the rate of inflation to when nasty Maggie and the evil Republican majority cut their sales tax money? Could it be that the FAIR plan actually forced Greece to use this year’s ”surplus funds” to keep tax increases down?
I’m sure Jody Siegel, the Working Families Party, the Democrats in the County Legislature, The Alliance For Quality Education, The ACLU, Metro Justice and Trans-Gender Atheists for Fairness in the Public Defender Selection Process will have a press conference to straighten this out and explain how the D&C misrepresented the facts in this story.
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Kinda calls into question the timing of the announcement. I’m surprised that all the school districts didn’t announce yesterday when no one was watching.
If Greece, of all districts, had such a small increase, this will challenge every single other district to explain why they couldn’t propose smaller than reported increases themselves.
I highly doubt any district will actually propose a 0% increase or *gasp* decrease in their budget, even though we now know they all have substantial surpluses stashed away in their coffers.