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Rensselaer County Taxpayers Association

March 1996                                                                                                                                                     Volume 1, Number 1

Welcome to the first edition of our newsletter. Come on in and set a spell. Our Southern Rensselaer Taxpayer’s Association members felt that somebody must disseminate the truth concerning our current problems and how they affect our everyday lives and our ability to survive.

We are not affiliated with any group or organization. We thus, cannot be controlled or limited by pressure groups or vested interests. Our loyalty is to the majority of our citizens who may be frustrated and feel a sense of loss as to how to make their voices heard when gross miscarriages of justice may appear.

Our membership includes business people, truck drivers, lawyers, educators, housewives, union members, engineers, pharmacologists, farmers, inventors, printers, consultants, retirees and young people just starting out. Best of all we are all volunteers.

Read on.

It’s a good thing the EGSCD bond was put on hold. At the January 24th school board meeting, the CORE committee made a presentation in which it was announced that plans for the Bell Top School outlined in the $29.7 million project may have to be revisited. The reason being that enrollment increases may be far higher than previously stated in the hailed Chung demographic study. Further expansion of Bell Top is not possible because of land constrictions, so the alternative being discussed is buying a new site and building a new school.

By the time the bond situation is resolved, we may find more reasons to be thankful for the appeal. Regarding the status of the appeal, it is planned to initiate an Article 78 proceeding in which the New York State Supreme Court will decide the fate of the bond and the arbitrary manner in which the Commissioner handled the appeal.

In part, the issue is the partisan opinions and inaccuracies presented in 3 ‘informational’ flyers disseminated at taxpayer expense.

Intensive research by Phil Vecchio has uncovered a history of progressive expansion of language and expenditures permitted by school boards and education Commissioners regarding the dissemination of ‘information’ to the voters.

Incrementally, school districts have tested the water to see how far they could go in stretching the boundaries of the law.

In early cases, Commissioners had given school boards the right to ‘inform and present facts’. Later they expanded those rights to include expending ‘reasonable’ sums of public money necessary to ‘inform’ the electorate, which a Commissioner later expanded to give school boards the right to ‘urge the approval’ of parents.

In the next increment, a Commissioner ruled that school boards could ‘assist’ voters with the boards viewpoint, and ‘publicize it’s position’, but that the expenditure of public funds to do so was ‘not unlimited’. He did not, however, determine what the limit might be.

In these cases dating as far back as nearly a century, the New York State Supreme Court has ruled, and higher courts have upheld, the reversal of the Commissioner’s decisions, stating for example:

"The public funds entrusted to the board belong equally to the proponents and opponents of the proposition, and the use of the funds to finance not the presentation of facts merely but also arguments to persuade the voters that only one side has merit, gives the dissenters just cause for complaint." Citizens to Protect Public Funds v. Board of Education of Parsippany-Troy Hills.

"It would be establishing a dangerous and untenable precedent to permit the government or any agency thereof, to use public funds to disseminate propaganda in favor of or against any issue or candidate. .....To educate, to inform, to advocate or to promote voting on any issue may be undertaken, provided it is not to persuade nor to convey favoritism, partisanship, partiality, approval or disapproval by a State agency of any issue, worthy as it may be." Stern v. Karmarsky.

At the heart of our far reaching case is the arrogant and offensive premise that voters need the ‘opinion’ of the school board as to how to vote, that we can not make the right decision based on the same facts the school board used to formulate it’s opinion. Just give us the facts. If the school board’s opinion is in fact unbiased, and representative of the majority of the community that elected them, they should have faith that the community will reach a concurring opinion.

By taking a position on the bond which suggests that the school board’s position is in the best interest of the children, they play on the conscience of ‘NO’ voters, and intimidate them into staying home on election day.

This is not in the true spirit of ‘A School and Community Working Together."

On Tuesday, January 23rd, members of the Southern Rensselaer County Taxpayers Association were one of thirty organizations that testified before a joint Senate-Assembly Committee requesting comment on Governor Pataki’s executive budget pertaining to education. SRCTA called for initiatives put forth by the Governor to curb the confiscatory local school tax burden as appropriate.

Also in a prepared statement, David Crawmer called for a school choice initiative for New York State. School choice would create competition between both private and public schools and reduce overall per pupil costs.

The Governor’s budget calls for a proportional increase in state aid to education from 28.7% to 30.2% for the 1996-97 fiscal year.

Additionally initiatives to strengthen local control of education by reducing state mandates, administrative efficiency incentives and taxpayer empowerment were put forth.

Specific taxpayer empowerment initiatives included a three-fifths voter supermajority for school budgets with local tax-levy spending increases above inflation. Contingency budgets can only grow by the inflation rate as measured by the consumer price index.

If you are a New York State resident 65 years old and if your household gross income is $18,000 or less you may qualify for a New York State Income Tax Credit of up to $375. Residents under 65 years old can qualify for a credit of $75. Please contact your tax preparer for specifics and obtain Form IT-214 from the New York State Office of Taxation.

This being our first publication, we would like to invite the public to become more acquainted with our organization and feel that it is their voice that needs to be heard.

To those who are already known to us and we to them, thanks for your kind words of encouragement. You don’t realize how much this means to us.

Beyond that, we invite anyone of good will to write us a short paragraph on a current topic of interest. No profanity please. If you have concerns about how your tax dollars are allocated, why not jot them down and send them in.

Are you endowed by nature with good health and strength enough to attend meetings, read and distribute pamphlets and write letters to the editor?

Are you endowed by good fortune enough to spend some of your time on activities other than those directly associated with earning a living and educating and raising your children?

If your answer is "yes" to both of these questions, then you can help the people of this state win what promises to be the most significant struggle for liberty and freedom in nearly a century -- i.e., since the women’s suffrage movement.

We, the people, need governmental reforms. We certainly cannot rely on the Legislature and judicial processes to bring about this needed reform. Our only hope is for the people to be successful in achieving three objectives:

First, to become informed. People everywhere in the state must be informed enough to know that a most important question will appear on the statewide ballot in November, 1997 -- "Shall there be a convention to revise the [New York] Constitution and amend the same?"

Second, to develop a people’s slate of convention delegates. People everywhere in the state must begin to work together, now, to develop a slate of 198 delegates to the convention who, most assuredly, will represent the people not the government at the convention.

Third, to develop the state’s sixth constitution. People everywhere must begin to work together, now, to analyze, debate and redraft the New York Constitution so that we are assured that what would become the state’s sixth constitution since 1777 will address all of the people’s legitimate concerns -- i.e., so that we have a large degree of assurance of what the people’s slate of delegates to the convention will eventually place before all of the people in 1999 for their approval.

An enormous amount of work must be done if we are to achieve these objectives. Everybody’s mind and hands and heart are needed.

In October of 1932, former President Calvin Coolidge and Alfred E. Smith (Governor of New York State and nominee for President in 1928) issued a joint statement of concern for America. It said:

This statement by these great Americans, coming at an earlier time of a crisis of confidence in government, serves us, today, as a "call to arms" in our struggle against the threat of a condition of servitude to today’s aggregation of ambitions and self-serving governmental powers.

The history of the present government in New York State is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an insidious tyranny over the people whose liberties the system was designed to protect and enhance.

It (the government) routinely denies people their fundamental right to petition the government for a redress of grievances; we are deprived in some cases of the benefit of trial by jury; we are not always allowed to face our accusers.

It has rendered the vote meaningless.

It conducts much of its legislative business in secret, passing unconstitutional laws, ordinances and regulations with regularity and exempting itself from many of its own laws.

It uses public funds to sway the results of elections.

We have witnessed this underhanded abuse by local school boards to promote "friendly" candidates and urge voters to approve high budgets and unneeded bond issues.