Testimony to the Joint
Committee on
Government Consolidation and
Shared Services
Thursday, December
7, 2006; Noon
Statehouse Annex, 4th Floor;
Testimony on Assembly Bill 4/Senate
Bill 42
Presented By
Eva M. Nagy
Vice President for
Legislation/Resolutions
I am Eva Nagy, president of the Franklin Township Board of
Education in
NJSBA has a longstanding history supporting efforts to lower property taxes. The legislation before us today—Assembly Bill 4, and its Senate counterpart, S-42—contain a number of proposals that citizens can support. We support efforts to remove impediments that local governments face when they want to share services and consolidate. We also believe citizens would benefit from the user-friendly budgets called for in A-4/S-42.
And we support the proposal to eliminate school-budget votes
when those proposals are under the state spending cap. Few states put their
school budgets out for a public vote the way
However, this legislation also contains some provisions that raise serious concerns.
One is moving the school board-member elections to November. We share legislators' desire to increase voter turnout. However, moving the non-partisan school board member elections to the partisan November election date would have no bearing on property tax rates. Instead, it would increase the risk that school board candidates align with party slates—in spite of our best intentions to prevent it.
Research shows that political parties currently play an insignificant role in school boards. A New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission report found that school board candidates statewide received only 5 percent of their campaign contributions from political parties. By comparison, local municipal candidates received an average of 76 percent of their campaign contributions from political parties.
It would be folly to believe that political parties wouldn't play a greater role in school elections if we moved them to November.
State law allows non-partisan municipal elections to be held in the springtime. There's a reason for this: To keep them free from partisan politics. School board elections should receive that same safeguard. Our children's education should never become a partisan issue.
We saw this same concept echoed in a 1958 ruling by Judge
Frederick Hall, a state Supreme Court Justice. Some of today's most prominent
law professors at
Facing the question of placing a school-related question on the November ballot, Justice Hall, who was then a Superior Court judge, rejected the idea of mixing school issues with the November elections. He ruled, and I quote, that the
"separation of school district from governing body has for one of its principal objects the very sound policy of keeping partisan politics out of the administration of local public education as far as possible"
Judge Hall added that, "the elections of board members shall be on the basis of educational issues and not partisan considerations."
Justice Hall knew this more than anyone. He was not only a jurist;
he was also a onetime school board member from
The separation of public schools from the political parties was a sound policy when the state's school-election laws were created a century ago. It was a sound policy when Justice Hall gave his decision nearly 50 years ago and it remains a sound policy today.
As an alternative to a November election, the New Jersey School Boards Association proposes that we consolidate school board elections with the non-partisan municipal elections and fire district elections on one date in the spring. This would attract more voters and prevent these races from becoming entangled with partisan politics.
On another issue, we're raising serious concerns with the proposal to create the so-called "super" county superintendents.
Think about it: Executive county superintendents—appointed by the governor, beholden to no voter—with near-dictatorial power over local school district budgets, and with control over purchasing and aspects of human resources. This will do nothing to reform property taxes. Instead, it would:
- Create a bloated county-level bureaucracy.
- Increase costs by wiping out savings achieved by individual local school districts.
- And distance education policy from the parents and the voters.
Meanwhile, classroom programming could fall victim to a structure that would give the super county superintendent veto power over communities' ability to voluntarily increase educational expenditures through above-cap ballot questions.
NJSBA is the only agency that tracks these additional ballot questions. Over the past five years, 88 percent of school districts kept their budgets under the state-imposed spending cap. Only about a tenth of school districts asked voters to exceed the cap.
And when the boards did ask for additional funding, our research found that the most common request was for classroom teachers or aides. Many ballots made it clear the school board was simply fighting to retain existing staff, existing programs.
And when boards did ask for additional funding, it was the local voters' decision, not the state's.
The bottom line?
- This bill will do nothing to rein in
property taxes.
- It could result in cost increases.
- It will hurt education.
Unfortunately, A-4/S-42 and many other special-session proposals detract from the real cause of high property taxes: inadequate state aid to education.
Since 2002, the state has short-changed communities more
than 700 million dollars in school aid. Local property taxes
filled in the gaps, and this only worsened
The National Education Association's statistics place
Despite these facts, school boards — not state officials — have been painted as the villains in this statehouse property tax drama.
Legislators have a difficult task. Citizens want you to rein in property taxes. But they also expect you to be champions of education. I thank the committee for this opportunity to testify today, and I hope you are able to keep the focus on the real root of our property-tax problems while creating a system that protects—not scapegoats—public education.