I had to take a break last week not because anything terrible happened. I just became overwhelmed. Work and the kids as always. I also became entangled in local politics.
Last Tuesday, a town planning board went on until midnight. I offended the local politicians by asking too many clumsy questions. The owner of a dilapidated car lot who stood to make serious money from this deal snarled at me from the back row. A big gun lawyer threatened me. My neighbors and I later watched a thug slam the car lot dude’s face against the side of a van. I went running over to make sure he was all right. While still on the ground he pointed a finger at me and shouted, “this is all your fault.” I guess I had delayed his sale, and he owed bad people money. Angry politicians, big gun lawyers, and the Sopranos. It’s too much for me.
But this story isn’t about a plan to put in a drive in bank in a residential neighborhood. It’s about schools.
70 percent of town’s tax money goes to schools. Though our town’s taxes are much lower than any of the neighboring towns, the old people in town can’t afford another cent. They also want more of the town’s money to go to their senior busses and community centers. The politicians in town are campaigning next week on a platform of no new families, no new homes, commercial development, and senior housing. The younger families want more people like them in the town. They want an attractive, walkable downtown. They want good schools and summer camps. Too bad they don’t have the time to run for office.
The town is also lobbying Trenton to send more money to the suburbs and not to the cities. The Abbott decision has forced the state to fully fund the urban schools, and other localities have had to pick up the slack. Within the town, the fault lines are old people versus young families. Within the state, it’s suburbs versus the cities (no doubt with a racial undertone).
How do you get around the old people versus young family tension? Should some towns cater to old people with exclusive housing and small schools, while other towns become centers for younger families? Should you keep all the old folks in one place, so they don’t become a drain in the schools in other towns? Gerrymander them into one zone to limit their influence on the larger area? But then young families end up with doubly high taxes to pay for schools, which benefit the entire society.
Or is the answer to make education funding a state function? Wouldn’t you still end up with the same battle, just at the state level? And then add to that problem a greater reluctance among taxpayers to spend money on schools outside of their town?
Lots of questions tonight and no answers. Well, one answer. Only enter into Jersey politics armed with your own big gun lawyer and a bullet proof vest.
Apt. 11d 
It’s hard to get school funding right – many of the people who benefit are not in the fight (children can’t vote, and anyway if my kids were voting, they would be swayed by the More Recess and Chocolate Milk For Lunch Party rather than the Do Your Homework Party; the employers who will be looking to hire literate and numerate workers in fifteen years aren’t thinking about this now; teachers and other school employees and their organizations certainly favor more funding but aren’t conspicuous in working to ensure that money’s spent in the best interests of the kids.)
My kids are in wonderful and extremely well funded public schools in our prosperous inner suburb (Arlington VA). The school district reports that it spends $16500 per child – money actually spent on my kids is about 2 1/2 teacher FTEs per class, the back of the envelope suggests that’s about $175000 per class or $7000 per kid. The other $9500 goes to administrators and counsellors and school nurses and buses and aides to follow the special needs kids around and heat, etc. Right amount? Too much? Jeez, I don’t know.
We have huge amounts of money sluicing into the County – our job count and our population count are almost equal, about 190000, so we have a LOT of commercial property paying taxes for every resident. And we’ve only got 18000 kids in school, so the burden per resident for schools is not very high. We don’t have much struggle between groups over spending, we just buy it all – our county government has been happily spending money for years on very nice amenities – sports complexes, flashy new schools, art centers, senior programs, etc. Paradise on the Potomac. There’s a lot of regret expressed that the county has become too expensive for poor and lower-middle-income people, but very little is being done about it.
The outer suburbs are much worse off, with a lot more housing relative to the commercial, so there is a lot more angst about spending out there. We are definitely getting a LOT of our money from property taxes on workplaces to which outer-burb people commute, and if I were the governor I would probably want to find a way to have some of that money flow to the poorer districts.
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Clearly it’s the property tax system of funding that makes your anti-bank battle so ugly.
Shifting the funding to the state level is a reasonable step.
Segregating old people and te other paths you’re proposing (straw men?) will onlly fracture society into smaller and smaller demographics and intensify these kind of us-them problems!
I know this makes property owners cringe, but anything that perpetuates the property tax system is unacceptable! It is (1) clearly unjust, as NY courts have ruled, and (2) probably unconsitutional, as VT decided
http://www.cnn.com/US/9702/06/briefs/vermont.html?eref=sitesearch
(Of course, NYC has yet to see a cent despite repeated clear rulings, and controversy continues in VT.)
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Hey Laura, please don’t get bumped off by Tony Soprano’s crew — we’d miss you!
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Where I grew up, funding for schools came from sales taxes. And now they have a lottery. Indiana uses the lottery for education funding, I think (lived there when I didn’t have kids and didn’t pay attention to things). My husband’s old school, which is in a declining neighborhood has a ton of money. If they relied on nearby property taxes, I’m sure the school would be declining along with the neighborhood. I like having mixed neighborhoods. I’d hate to see that disappear.
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I promise to avoid mafia rubouts in the future. It was a classic stupid-Laura thing to do. I’m on one side of the street with about 7 other people. We watch his face hit the van. The big guy is still stomping around the place. Nobody else moves, except for me who crosses the street to see if I can stop things. I think in a previous life, I was a really big man, because I always forget that I’m a rather petite blogger.
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Problem With Cash Advance
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Vasectomy Housing! Jersey, gotta love it!
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aCwhFcKbEIZY&refer=exclusive
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