Nobody likes the new MTA mobility tax, but perhaps no one is more confounded by it than school districts and the cooperative educational system called BOCES that serves them.
The schools are promised reimbursement. BOCES, which provides educational services to the schools, is not.
“There”™s a lot of mystery in this thing,” said John Pennoyer, superintendent of Dutchess County BOCES and the interim superintendent of BOCES in Orange County.
“Why should school districts be tax collectors for the MTA?”
The mobility payroll tax is 33 cents on every $100 paid to employees that all businesses and municipalities in the 12-county area served by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority must remit to help the MTA pay its bills. The tax was approved by the state Legislature in the spring and designed to raise $2.25 billion as part of a plan to bail out the agency. The first payments came due Nov. 2 and subsequent payments will be made quarterly.
While the plan proposes to reimburse school districts after they pay the tax, the earliest date for reimbursement would be April 1, 2010. According to preliminary estimates, the New Rochelle school district will have to fork over some $400,000 while Mamaroneck schools will pony up some $200,000, to be returned by the state at an unspecified future date, though not sooner than April 1, 2010.
“Good luck getting it back,” said Stephen J. Tibbetts, assistant superintendent of business and administrative services finance for southern Westchester BOCES. He said that from a cash flow perspective, such collections “absolutely” could hurt school districts.
But the state”™s school districts at least have a promise they will get the money back. That is not the case for BOCES, the Board of Cooperative Educational Services that exist within the counties as independent nonprofit entities that in effect, sell services to school districts at a cheaper rate than an individual school district could pay to create such services themselves. But the new tax will raise costs for school districts even if their own payment is refunded, because BOCES will have to raise the cost of providing services.
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“We pay the tax,” said Robert J. Monson, superintendent for southern Westchester BOCES. “Whatever its wisdom, when the Legislature passed that bill they made a decision that the tax would be paid by BOCES.”
The rationale for exempting schools was to avoid forcing public school districts to add more to the already hefty property tax burden paid by New York businesses and residents to finance education. But Monson noted that BOCES is a very real extension of public schools.
Southern Westchester BOCES serves 62 school districts from throughout the New York metropolitan area with various services, particularly through hosting the special education regional information center. It is chartered primarily to serve 33 school districts in southern Westchester.
Under the mobility tax, southern Westchester BOCES will pay some $225,000 annually for its 1,400 employees, out of a total budget of $153 million. In Dutchess County, the BOCES program has a payroll of $25.6 million for the 2009-10 fiscal year that ends June 30. The tax will cost the organization $87,200 for this fiscal year. Next year, fiscal 2010-11, on a payroll of $26.7 million, the mobility tax will cost Dutchess BOCES $91,000.
“We have about 130 budget lines that we work with, subdivided in various ways,” said superintendent Pennoyer of Dutchess. “For each of our services, we probably will craft some small savings across a lot of lines. But just to get a handle on what $90,000 means, we at BOCES don”™t have a lot of teachers, but for that amount it could be a teacher,”
“It has not affected our programs, but it is affecting the districts we serve,” said Tibbetts, of Westchester. “We do not receive tax money, we charge districts for our services. So we are essentially charging them more.”
