Joe Rooney, a Delta Air Lines pilot who is raising five kids in Abington Township, is about to get a higher tax bill, and he isn’t particularly happy about it.

“We are not bringing in enough money for the spending we are proposing,” said Rooney, whose annual $3,922 property-tax bill on his Maple Avenue home stands to increase by $113 as of July 1.

Rooney, who is running for school board, believes the Abington School District hasn’t done enough to rein in what he views as an outsize, $147 million budget for the 2015-16 school year, $101 million of which will be provided by him and other property owners.

Throughout the state, the property tax remains the prime funding source for schools, part of a system that Gov. Wolf characterized as unfair in an Inquirer interview Friday.

Since taking office five months ago, Wolf has orchestrated an all-out campaign to increase school funding while shifting the burden from the real estate levy, but the state commission charged with coming up with a new school-funding formula missed a deadline last week. And the Democratic governor and the Republican leadership in Harrisburg are locked in a budget stalemate.

For now, Rooney and upwards of 500,000 homeowners in Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery Counties await a short-term reality: a fresh round of tax increases.

Based on budgets to take effect July 1 – not all of which have been made final – the average annual increases for median-price homes in the four counties would be about $115. Taxes would have jumped more than $400 on those same homes over the last five years – more than $1,000 in the Lower Merion Area School District, and more than $700 in the Kennett Consolidated and Tredyffrin/Easttown School Districts.

The flurry of tax increases may feel like a new normal to property owners, perhaps like a form of fiscal water torture.

But frustrated superintendents and board members say the pressure is coming from fixed and mandated costs, particularly pensions. Unlike in New Jersey, budgets in Pennsylvania are approved by school boards and not subject to referendums unless proposed tax increases exceed certain thresholds.

In the last five years, almost every school district in Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery Counties has raised property taxes at least once, and the steady drip has contributed to real financial pain in some communities. Even the Upper Merion Area School District, where taxes historically have been low thanks to the King of Prussia mall and a bounty of commercial real estate, saw a 19 percent climb.

The lion’s share
“I don’t think there’s a whole lot of wiggle room,” said Lawrence Feinberg, a longtime school board member in the Haverford Township School District, in Delaware County, where property taxes have risen by more than 20 percent in that five-year span. Feinberg, who also monitors statewide trends as cochairman of the Keystone State Education Coalition, said the prime drivers were pension contributions. Districts statewide confront $535 million in new costs next school year.

School districts also are on the hook for fixed costs such as charter-school payments and contractually bound salaries. Wage-and-benefit packages typically constitute the overwhelming majority of school costs.

While taxpayers often question new school facilities, Rooney believes they should look more closely at district paychecks. In Rooney’s district, Abington, where the superintendent recently signed a five-year contract with a $319,714 annual salary, wages and benefits would constitute more than 80 percent of the 2015-16 budget.

Yet antitax passions evidently have cooled. To his surprise, Haverford’s Feinberg said, the surge in tax increases has not been accompanied by a surge in public outcry, in marked contrast to prior years. Feinberg’s own bill is slated to increase by $226 next year – more than $1,400 over the last five years.

“We didn’t get a letter, e-mail, or a phone call,” he said, after Haverford’s tax increase of slightly less than 3 percent this year. “Nobody’s complaining.”

Most of the agitation about property taxes has shifted west, to the state capital. Wolf has proposed a sweeping $3 billion funding overhaul that he says would lower property taxes in the majority of Pennsylvania districts, especially those with lower incomes, and pay for the changes with a rise in the state’s income and sales taxes.

The biggest factor
Republicans, who solidly control both houses, have balked, insisting that changes in the pension system must come first.

Eric Wellington, the Upper Merion school board president, said pension costs were the biggest factors in his district’s decision to raise property levies to the maximum possible under state law.

As in many other districts, Wellington said that Upper Merion reduced its payroll and reigned in spending during the worst years of Pennsylvania’s school-funding crunch, leaving few options besides taxes. “I live there,” said Wellington, whose bill will go up by $86, to $2,719, a more than $400 increase in the last five years. “I have no desire to vote a tax increase on ourselves.”

In Neshaminy, school board director Steve Pirritano said a previous board started putting aside pension money in the early 2000s, and that allowed the district to keep taxes from rising for the last six years. But that could change.

With a projected $8 million deficit in next year’s budget, the latest proposed budget calls for a tax increase of nearly 7 percent, although Pirritano said he hopes it can be avoided.

Last month William Hartman, a professor at Pennsylvania State University’s College of Education, and Timothy Shrom, business manager of the Solanco School District, appeared before a statewide symposium on school funding and made a grim forecast.

Hartman and Shrom predicted that without major changes, most districts won’t have enough money over the next three years to balance their budgets and that 60 percent of them will be pressed to make severe spending cuts. The gap between Pennsylvania’s rich and poor districts will grow even wider, they predicted.

On Thursday, members of the advocacy group Общественные граждане для детей и молодежи rallied at county courthouses in Norristown, Media, and West Chester, demanding that the state adopt a new funding formula to close the divide between wealthy and underprivileged districts that a recent report found is the nation’s highest.

“I hope this is the time for change,” Patricia Demnisky, reading supervisor for the Norristown School District, said at the Norristown rally. She said she supported new education funding because she has seen her district’s class size grow without the supplies that teachers need.

Haverford’s Feinberg said that payments to charter schools represented a huge out-of-classroom expense, about $350,000 in his district in 2014-15, and even more in neighboring districts such as the Upper Darby and William Penn School Districts. Outside Philadelphia, he said, most of that amount is paid to online cyber charters. But the districts, he says, have no choice but to pay up.

“It’s money that we can’t say no to,” he said.

The Philadelphia Inquirer – June 14, 2015 – Читать статью онлайн