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School Budget - Passed
Yes 1094
No 641
Bus Proposition - Passed
Yes 903
No 760
School Board
Brian Cournoyer 756
Stephen J. Bagley 799
Patrick Rausch (incumbent) 809
Michael Hekking 550
Write-ins
Brian Kazmin 7
Marianne Tozzi 1
Erin Quinn 1
Jeff Logan 1
5 comments:
I'm so happy the school budget passed, because now I have even more reasons my family and I need to sell our home and move. Between my property tax increasing >2% and now my school taxes increasing >4% - that's equals about a $600 increase. I haven't received a raise at my job in almost three years. How do these people expect us to live with them taxing us to death. Thanks again for ruining our dreams New Paltz!
Anonymous, I think you will have to leave the state to find your dreams again. Rondout Valley, for example, cut spending 2% but the state cut even more, leaving them with a 4% tax levy hike. Our system of funding education is broken. If you find a place to settle where kids are educated yet citizens not bankrupted by it, please write and let us know how they do it.
Interesting to compare the two local May votes this year:
The total vote for the candidates for mayor of the village of New Paltz was 884.
The total vote on the school budget was 1735, which is less than double the vote (1768) for the village mayor (the town outside the village is said to have roughly the same population as the village). So the supposedly uninvolved village electorate outperformed the total town of New Paltz (which includes the village, of course) and town of Gardiner (which is part of the school district) in turnout for the school budget vote.
The village residents remain as active or more active in the affairs of the village (in a May election) as do the residents of the town.
I think the write-in votes for "Brian Kazmin" should be counted for Brian Cournoyer because they got his first name correct, and because the sound of the first letter of the last names is the same.
There are many innovative ways to cut school budgets down to size, with no necessary effect on student performance. Most of these would need to be done/allowed by the state legislature, but that's also where teachers unions and education bureaucrats have such great influence. They prize the status quo and want more of it.
At the local level, the school district could have done better than it did this year in tightening its budget. It should have gone for at least a 1% overall decrease, just to show a small courtesy to taxpayers by nominally recognizing economic conditions.
As for how the revenue is raised, the local burden could be substantially lowered by the state introducing market forces to school districts as well as allowing innovation in instruction. There is no need for taxes to keep rising every year.
New York State will be getting much worse before it gets better, if it gets better, a very big if at this point. With businesses being continuously stressed by regulations and taxes at the federal level, why would they locate or stay in New York? There are many other states in the U.S., not to mention foreign locations, with lower tax burdens. And it doesn't look like firms in the financial industry necessarily think New York City is any longer a must be place to be.
Things are going to have to change. The first change will be waking up to reality.
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