| With spring in the air, I thought I would trot out this op/ed I wrote for the Courant two years ago. Nothing has changed of course: property taxes continue to spiral upward, budgets are getting tighter, and people are getting angrier, yet we continue to play by the same rules and expect different results. As I told a bunch of angry citizens at a local budget hearing last year, we are all going to be here next year, just as angry, and arguing over the same things unless we change the rules.
Another spring has arrived in Connecticut, and with it the obligatory haggling over town budgets. As usual, you have one side that stubbornly demands no increase in what it rightly perceives as already too high property taxes, and another side that decries what it views as draconian cuts to the education budget. Neither side ends up winning.
A modest increase in the mill rate is usually finally approved after lengthy hearings, but never enough to fully fund all the wished-for education programs. Both sides leave the process dissatisfied, angry, and all too quick to blame their local elected officials. The most tragic aspect of this yearly ritual, however, is the fact that both sides do a lot of talking and shouting, but they never really take a step back and listen to each other. If they did, they would discover that we are all players in a game in which the rules are stacked against us. |
| In Connecticut we have connected our highest priority and fastest-growing expense in local budgets - public education - to the slowest-growing source of revenue - local property taxes. Connecticut's local public education system is more reliant on the local property tax than all other states in the union because the percentage of education funding coming from state revenues - 37 percent - is near the bottom (45th) among the states. As a result, the property tax burden in Connecticut is the third-highest in the nation per capita and ranks as the 11th-highest in the nation when it comes to the percentage of personal income going to property taxes. These "rules" are a prescription for strife, whether evident in failed local budget referendums, constrained educational investment, or intergenerational struggles over priorities.
Furthermore, Connecticut's property tax structure has created a competition among the 169 towns for property tax funds and has put pressure on local officials to build the grand list by commercially developing available land - the so-called fiscalization of land use - to offset the high cost of residential development they can do little to control. The result is urban sprawl, the loss of farmland and open space, increased traffic congestion, and a decline in the quality of life in far too many of our communities.
With the rules as they are, local officials are pretty much constrained as to what they can do about these budgetary and land-use problems. Local officials are almost forced to produce the results that citizens, frustrated by high taxes, improperly funded education programs and bad land-use decisions, find so aggravating.
I am in no way attempting to absolve local officials from blame. In my hometown of Canton, for example, buying open space could have been made a priority years ago as a way to mitigate the impact of residential development. In addition, far too many of our local elected officials continue to believe that we can grow our way out of our financial problems.
Residential development attracts more commercial development which, in turn, attracts more residential development - it is just a vicious cycle. Property taxes, already some of the highest in the country, will simply continue to rise.
So what do we do? First, we need to acknowledge that the rules of the game are stacked against us. Whether you are for increased education budgets, lower property taxes, or the preservation of open space, we are all going to lose. Second, we need to pressure our elected state officials to change the rules. How the state funds local education needs to be completely overhauled. Simply put, the state needs to pay its fair share of local education expenditures.
It is imperative to increase the state's share to rectify the imbalance between state and local contributions to support local education. We should employ a diverse range of taxes with a broad base, with balance among income, sales, and property taxes. This means we should specifically avoid a heavy reliance on the local property tax, which hurts families and businesses, grows revenues slowly, and contributes to urban sprawl. Finally, we need to embrace regional cooperation as a way to achieve a more sustainable economic structure as well as a way to combat sprawl.
As I have stated before, a portion of sales tax revenue generated within a region could be pooled and redistributed based on various factors. One-third of the pooled revenue would be redistributed to the cities based on population. Another third would stay in the city where the development is located. The final third would also go to the host city, if and only if, it meets certain "smart growth" goals, including affordable housing creation, open space preservation, infill development and the implementation of a regional land use and economic growth plan.
Someone once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. If we don't change the rules of the game, we will continue to see the same fruitless results every spring. It's time we embrace the spirit of spring and begin to sow the seeds of change.
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