Speaker offers ways to fund school taxes

SOUTH BRUNSWICK - Dr. Ernest C. Reock Jr. spoke about the funding of New Jersey schools and how property taxes tie in at the South Brunswick Democratic Club meeting on Monday at Pierre's in Monmouth Junction.

Reock, who was a member of the New Jersey Property Tax Convention Task Force in 2004 and worked as a faculty member at the Rutgers University Center for Government Services until his retirement in 1992, started by saying that he does not think the funding plan should be done during the lame duck legislative session, as the governor hopes.

"We've been waiting for a new plan for at least three or four years," Reock said. "This is not a very good way to add public policy. To try to race through this without discussion is really going to cause problems in the future."

According to Reock, the state has the option of running the school system through the state, but that only Hawaii has a state school system. He said that in every other state, they delegate the funding to the local school districts.

"That means property taxes because that's the only thing local governments have in New Jersey," he said.

Yet each municipality in New Jersey has a different amount of property that's taxable, which makes things uneven.

"We have a wide variation in taxable property to run the schools," Reock said. "The objective of state aid is to provide enough money everywhere, so everyone has enough to do the job they have to do."

He said previous formulas have been declared unconstitutional for not giving enough money to the poorer districts, which created the current Abbott designations, allotting more money for those districts that need it.

The state spends $10 billion per year on school funding, which is one-third of its budget. However, it only funds about 44 percent of the school budget as opposed to the state average of over 55 percent. South Brunswick gets less help from the state because it's not really a poor community, according to Reock. However, South Brunswick is only at 86 percent of the state average when it comes to taxable property per pupil.

"Why is it so low?" he said. "It's on a per pupil basis and we have a heck of a lot of kids."

Reock also said the state aid formula changes every year because of new data.

"The first five years of the formula was dynamic," he said. "Then we ran into a recession and the bottom fell out of the state revenue bag. State aid has been frozen for five years.

So what can be done to lessen the burden on property taxes?

"Raise the income tax, sales tax, sell the turnpike," Reock suggested. "They could do something with the turnpike to monetize it, to reduce our debt level. But, I don't know if I have an answer."

Members of the club offered their own opinions. Mayor Frank Gambatese thinks people just need to pay.

"People need to stop complaining. It's a product of the newspapers trying to inflame things, saying that they'll be in the poor house because of it."

Democratic Club President Jo Hochman mentioned that senior citizens should not refuse to pay for education.

"Who do you think will come up and pay for your retirement," Hochman asked. "They're not just children, they're our future. We have to make sure they're taken care of."

Club member Dean Behrend thinks the government should raise the income tax and that monetizing the turnpike would simply be a stopgap measure.

Fellow member Phyllis Douglis also believes raising the income tax is the only real solution, and that the poorer districts need more help.

"People should pay a little more. It's the fairest thing," she said. "These kids need more. Their parents have too many problems of their own. These kids have to have help."

- Chris Murino