The New Hampshire Legislature was a month past its April 1 deadline last Thursday when it approved an unpopular group of new taxes to fund the state's public schools. The new tax law narrowly averted a state-wide crisis, allowing local governments to collect taxes, keeping schools open for business and preventing mass layoffs of teachers.
State Senator Clifton Below '78 said the law will add financial stress to well-off communities like Hanover, but will "provide property tax relief in some places that sorely need it."
He said many legislators voted for the tax law even though they did not fully support it.
"I think it's a minority of people who are pleased with the outcome one way or the other," he said.
He said he voted in favor of it "with great reluctance and ambivalence because it is a bad plan."
"It maintains over-reliance on property taxes," Below said of the newly approved tax law. Also, he said, the law does not provide enough funding for state schools.
"We had to do something for the sake of the students, teachers and school boards," Below said.
"There is about a $70 million gap left in revenue that wasn't identified," Below said.
He said the state only covers about 60 percent of the costs of public education. Local governments will have to provide the rest of the funds, and for some localities, that may be tough.
New Hampshire's legislature was pressured to enact new tax legislation to fund schools after a 1997 state Supreme Court decision that rejected the state's traditional practice of funding public schools with local property taxes. The court said the local school tax compromised student equality throughout the state.
In response to this decision, the legislature passed a state-wide income tax - which would have been the first ever in the state - earlier this year. But Governor Jeanne Shaheen vetoed it, in accordance with her pre-inauguration pledge to Manchester's influential conservative newspaper, The Union Leader.
Shaheen quickly signed the new tax law into law Thursday, averting looming shortages of school funds which would have led to teacher layoffs and possibly school shut downs.
Below said he thinks the new tax law is a step in the right direction, but not a final resolution to the school tax problems.
"The bill acknowledges that more work has to be done in approving upon taxes," he said. "It will be built upon."
He said that the state-wide income tax that he had sponsored may still come into effect in the future. He thinks the issue of the income tax will come into the spotlight again during the next gubernatorial race, which will be in the fall of 2000.
He said an income tax would be a fairer way of collecting the needed funds for schooling because property values do not necessarily reflect ability to pay taxes since different families put different shares of their total wealth into their property.
