Education And The Property Tax

The Connecticut Conference of Municipalities (CCM) released a report this week aimed directly at candidates in this year’s state legislative contests, hoping to catch them in these last weeks before the election, when they are most attuned to their constituents. The point of the report was to once again make a case that towns and cities have been making for years: Connecticut is too dependent on local property taxes to pay for public education and other local services. CCM’s Executive Director Jim Finley told reporters on Monday that the property tax is “the most regressive tax in our state and local tax system.” And because of the gross disparities in the grand lists of the town’s wealthiest and poorest communities, the state’s heavy reliance on property taxes to fund local schools has created the nation’s largest “achievement gap” between Connecticut’s best and worst schools. When it comes to quality education, Connecticut is a tattered patchwork of opportunity.

The persistent inequities in the quality of education around the state create the biggest challenges for the state’s urban schools in Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport. Yet the overreliance by school districts on the property tax even in more stable and affluent communities like Newtown is having a negative effect. It has led to pitched battles each spring over taxation and education, which in times of stalled or slow economic growth has presented local schools with the dual challenges of strictly limited resources and tentative local support.

The CCM report calls for education finance reform, which the group believes is the essential component for property tax reform. CCM notes that the state’s education cost sharing grants are underfunded by $700 million, and special education costs for local districts are nearly $2 billion a year; the state’s share of those costs have been underfunded by more than $100 million. CCM does acknowledge the state’s recent efforts to open up new revenue sources of towns and cities through a Municipal Revenue Sharing Account, which was inaugurated in the FY2012-FY2013 biennial state budget. The account is funded in part by state sales taxes and by the state portion of real estate conveyance taxes. But initiatives like this one are just a start.

Reforms need to include full funding of existing state obligations for local ECS grants and special education and more revenue sharing programs, which are outlined in the CCM report. And, as always, municipalities need to be freed from the burdens of unfunded state mandates, including the state’s minimum budget requirement, which requires each town or city to spend at least as much on education as it did the previous year, which sounds reasonable enough until you consider that many districts, including Newtown, are facing declining enrollments in the coming years.

We encourage everyone interested in municipal finances and education to read the CCM report, which is available online at NewtownBee.com this week. And we strongly urge the report’s intended audience — aspiring and incumbent and state legislators up for election this year — to review it and take its recommendations to heart. If we are to create and sustain a system of public education that adequately serves all the children of Connecticut no matter where they live, we need to devise a system of funding that education that is not so tightly bound to the most regressive tax we have — the property tax.