Opinion ID: 1898472
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Municipal Overburden

Text: Municipal overburden is the excessive tax levy some municipalities must impose to meet governmental needs other than education. It is a common characteristic in poorer urban districts, a product of their relatively low property values against which the local tax is assessed and their high level of governmental need. The governmental need includes the entire range of goods and services made available to citizens: police and fire protection, road maintenance, social services, water, sewer, garbage disposal, and similar services. Although the condition is not precisely defined, it is usually thought of as a tax rate well above the average. The underlying causes of municipal overburden are many and complex. Its consequences in this case, however, are clear and simple. The poorer urban school districts, sharing the same tax base with the municipality, suffer from severe municipal overburden; they are extremely reluctant to increase taxes for school purposes. Not only is their local tax levy well above average, so is their school tax rate. The oppressiveness of the tax burden on their citizens by itself would be sufficient to give them pause before raising taxes. Additionally, the rates in some cases are so high that further taxation may actually decrease tax revenues by diminishing total property values, either directly because of the tax-value relationship, or indirectly by causing business and industry to relocate to another municipality. Plaintiffs argue that municipal overburden restricts these poorer urban districts' ability to raise more money through increased school taxes to achieve a thorough and efficient education. That contention is urged in support of their claim that the present system, relying on local levies, must be converted to one where state revenues predominate and local taxing ability is relatively unimportant. It is an argument of constitutional dimension: it responds to the State's claim that a thorough and efficient education can be achieved under the Act through the unlimited power of school districts to increase education revenues by raising taxes, and it supports plaintiffs' preferred constitutional remedy. The Commissioner's position is that municipal overburden is irrelevant to the constitutional issue. He maintains that the school board is obliged as a matter of statutory and constitutional duty to raise as much money as is needed for a thorough and efficient education no matter what the tax consequences, no matter how much the tax increase, no matter how high the present tax, and no matter how high the present local municipal tax. If tax inequity exists, that may be a concern for the Legislature but it must not be for the school district. The Commissioner's views are set forth strongly and unambiguously. He portrays school boards, in even the poorest urban districts, that refuse to substantially increase taxes that already border on the confiscatory, as shirking their clear duty and, in some districts, as yielding to political pressure. His position rests on his conception of the Act as one with funding provisions that make it certain that enough money for a thorough and efficient education will be raised. That conclusion, he says, is irresistible given the districts' unlimited power to tax, their duty to do so, and the power of the Board and the Commissioner to force them to if needed. We respectfully disagree. The social and economic pressures on municipalities, school districts, public officials, and citizens of these disaster areas  many poorer urban districts  are so severe that tax increases in any substantial amount are almost unthinkable. To pejoratively label that uniform resistance to increased taxes as political fails to recognize the desperate situation that some school boards may face. The record is clear on this issue. The former Commissioner recognized that the refusal of such districts to raise taxes was strongly based on legitimate concerns. Similarly, the present Commissioner has (with one possible exception) never compelled a tax increase during the period of his eight year tenure. We do not pass on the legal contentions of the Commissioner in this respect. Our conclusion concerning municipal overburden is that it effectively prevents districts from raising substantially more money for education. It is a factual conclusion. It is based on the record history of the failure of any effort, whether through the actions of a school district or the Board or Commissioner, legal or otherwise, through the more than ten year period that the Act has been in effect, to achieve substantially increased local funding through school tax increases. That factual finding is one of the bases for our conclusion that the funding mechanism of the Act will never achieve a thorough and efficient education because it relies so heavily on a local property base already over-taxed to exhaustion.