Tonight (2019-09-24) was a meeting of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education (BoE).
The meeting was pretty straightforward. Workshop and a potential future field trip were the big discussion items.
The topic of the workshop was school taxes, and how the levy, assessment, and enrollment interact with that. Wasn’t really any new data, but it was consolidated and presented well. Feel free to look at the information provided if that sort of thing has any interest to you.
I got a sense that the people in the room aren’t fans of Golisano. Mostly because of his challenging of his property values, which meant they had to pay more (due to the wonders of ‘tax levies’). While I can understand this viewpoint, I think it points towards a larger flaw in the tax system. As it is, it becomes too easy to be divided into an ‘us against them’ mentality here. Since every dollar someone can get lowered from their bill, gets added to someone else’s. It’s almost like the system is built to encourage class anger.
As hinted at above, the nature of the tax levy is that the amount is collected. The actual assessed values of anything is functionally irrelevant, once a levy is approved that is the amount that will be collected. While I can understand the benefit to the taxing authority, as they then know what their income will be, it looks to have negative impact on the public at large. In part, as mentioned above, encouraging unrest towards our neighbors. But also in obfuscating too much of the process. Which in turn, creates the appearance the taxing authority (school district in this case) is playing games with the numbers. And to be fair, they are, but only because the law forces them to.
Brought back to the budget vote, it was pointed out that what voters are actually voting on is not so much the budget, as the levy change. Since no budget passing leads to a contingency budget, which retains the existing levy. The difference then becomes, from a tax payer standpoint, the proposed levy and the previous. Which of the ~$50 million budget is ~$700k (or so, feel free to check Bruce’s (Business and Operations) numbers if you want more details).
At the end of the conversation Gene (Superintendent) asked for ‘take aways’, and I had two.
The first was that, from an income standpoint, the district has very few options. Not increase taxes (causing financial challenges), raise taxes to the levy limit (lower, but not removing those financial challenges), exceeding the levy limit (most likely leading to a ‘contingency budget’, and thus no levy change), or getting ‘creative’ (which might as well be synonymous with ‘illegal’).
And second, Albany is clueless. Each time they change the laws/rules/whatnot about taxes, it makes things worse. This was discussed on STAR, levy limit, PILOT, equalization rates, etc. Either the people putting together these systems have no idea what they are doing, or are actively malicious as they try to break the state, local governments, and people. Hanlon says it’s stupidity, but I have a hard time believing any group could be that stupid, that often, and not all win Darwin Awards.
In addition, there was a discussion about a potential field trip to Washington DC in 2021. Considering how much of this is still in the planning stages I wouldn’t have even mentioned it, except for the amusing way the discussion started.
As I go to (too) many meetings, I often find the process used to be of interest. Or, as in this case, the process not used, so learned as needed. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one that had a chuckle watching this play out. Still, it worked out in the end. The agenda was amended and they went on to discuss a potential future field trip.
It was also mentioned that there is now a transgender bathroom in the high school. Loretta was supposed to be a joke, not taken seriously. Especially not for children. So yeah, that’s where we are today.
And on that pleasant note, those are my Observations From Audience Land for the September 24, 2019 meeting of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education.
As has become the norm for this group, Agenda’s and similar information can be found at HFL’s BoardDocs page.