During a discussion about New Jersey’s highest in the nation property tax burden, NJBIA Chief Government Affairs Officer Christopher Emigholz joined NJ101.5 Eric Scott’s recent “Jersey Thing” broadcast to discuss solutions.
Public school spending is the largest driver of New Jersey property taxes, which is why NJBIA is supporting legislation, S-2646, sponsored by Sen. Vin Gopal (D-11), that would mandate that county superintendents create plans to consolidate school districts with fewer than 500 students into regional school districts. Those plans would be submitted to the state Commissioner of Education for approval or disapproval.
Emigholz noted that businesses pay almost half of all property taxes collected by local governments in this state, even though the issue is often framed as a problem that affects only homeowners. Moreover, businesses are excluded from all the state’s residential property tax rebate programs reserved for homeowners and tenants.
“We're paying the full boat with property taxes ... and so we are very, very invested in structural reforms to improve our property tax system,” Emigholz told Scott. “We support investing in our schools, but let's make sure that's getting to kids in the classroom, helping them get ready for college and career, not necessarily supporting schools that are inefficient and need to find some savings."
Consolidation doesn’t mean only a merger of school districts. There are also savings that can be found from the regionalization of services such as transportation, purchasing, and administration.
Beyond the cost of running school districts, the business community also cares about the quality of the education students receive because those students are New Jersey’s future workforce, Emigholz said.
“We’re not going to hurt that quality by consolidating schools,” Emigholz said. “How many times have we heard stories about a small K-8 district (whose students) go to the regional high school district where the science, math and foreign language curriculums are done differently. And so, those kids initially aren’t ready and don’t have the opportunities to advance in their high school careers.
Emigholz noted that consolidating school districts produces savings in three ways.
“Number one, there's economies of scale,” he said. “We know there's a reason people go to Costco to save money. You buy bigger, you can sometimes save money.
“Number two is, there's going to be efficiencies found,” he said. “Because if you're operating a bus route, if you're operating a healthcare plan, if you're operating any of these programs where districts have vendors, well, if you combine that with somebody else, and now you're having a larger plan that you're going out to bid on, a larger plan that you're trying to negotiate with the vendor on, that could save you some money.
“And lastly, and this is the point that sometimes gets forgotten in this, is teachers’ contracts,” Emigholz said. “I support paying our teachers all we should, because they're an important part of our workforce development pipeline.”
But when you have several K-8 school districts in different towns sending their students to one regional high school district, the teachers’ union uses the contracts they negotiate in each of these districts as leverage against one another, Emigholz said.
“What happens is, one strikes a contract that is maybe at 3.5 %, then the next one says, oh, they got 3.5%, we’ve got to get 4%. The next one says, we’ve got to get 4.5%. The next one says we’ve got to get more. They use each other for leverage. But guess what? If there was one contract for the entire region, taxpayers are saving money, teachers are still getting a good contract, and there’s still negotiation,” Emigholz said.
“If we can bring people together, I think we're saving money, and we're going to improve quality,” Emigholz said.
To listen to the entire interview, go here.
