Stuff about things.
In 1999, the New Hampshire Supreme Court declared the state’s tax system to fund education ”unconstitutional” and gave the legislature a short window to come up with a plan to fix it. The legislature, reluctantly, picked a State Wide Education Property Tax (SWEPT) to address the Claremont Education Funding Lawsuit. The original formula passed by the legislature had a $6.60 SWEPT rate, which brought huge relief to about 80 percent of property owners while raising taxes on the property-richest communities who were/are paying the lowest tax rates in New Hampshire.
But the property-richest towns were not happy with the new formula and hired attorneys to come up with a plan. Their lawyers came up with a clever scheme called “donor towns” and many people bought into it, including many legislators.
So the formula was redone at a lower rate with a cap on how much money SWEPT could raise. Anyone with decent math/spatial reasoning skills could see that this new formula was wholly beneficial to the property-rich/lowest-tax-rate communities, designed to continuously reduce the tax rate and bring us back to the disparities that initially caused the Claremont lawsuit. Shame on New Hampshire for not having the intellectual horsepower and mathematical skills to see that this was a scam. The future was easy to see and is now here. Since the change was made, property-poorer cities and towns all over the state have been cheated out of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue that had a Supreme Court decision to back it up.
Today, the lawsuits are coming back. The Conval district has already filed and is in the courts. More lawsuits are likely to come. We would not have been in this position had the legislature done the right thing and not kowtowed to the property-richest communities. You see, while they only represent about 20 to 25 percent of our citizens, they have a disproportionate percentage of the political clout among their residents.
So, with education funding once again in the courts, is there a case to be made that the monies lost by the property-poor communities over the years by the redone and unconstitutional formula be owed to the property-poorer communities? Manchester alone would likely be owed over $100 million. To be clear, if this were a lawsuit between two companies, those lost funds would be on the table.
Fred Bramante is a past chairman and member of the New Hampshire State Board of Education. He speaks and consults on education redesign to regional, state and national organizations.
