BERKELEY – The Township Council passed a resolution urging the state to change the rules on how school boards raise taxes.
“It used to be, the school board would propose the budget. If the public voted it down, it would then go to the town,” Mayor John Bacchione explained.
Now, under a rule put in place by Governor Phil Murphy in the year before he left, schools can potentially raise taxes up to 9.9%.
State law makes it so that towns collect all property taxes. The town then doles out the appropriate amount to the county, schools, etc.
“We’re 27%” of the total tax bill of a Berkeley resident, Bacchione said. The rest is the other taxing entities.
He said he’s already spoken to state lawmakers such as Senator Carmen Amato (R-9th), Senator Robert Singer (R-30th), and Assemblyman Gregory McGuckin (R-10th).
The council members in attendance voted in favor of sending this resolution to the state. Councilman Thomas Grosse was absent.
Many years ago, the residents would vote to pass the budget for the upcoming school year in April, which was also when board of education elections were.
If the voters shot down the budget, it would go to the town’s governing body to decide what to do. They usually had just a few weeks to digest all of the budget information. They would choose a number to cut from the budget, and then school districts would have to figure out how to make the new budget work.
In 2010, then-Governor Chris Christie worked out a deal with then-Senate President Steve Sweeney that school districts couldn’t increase taxes more than 2%, but there were some line items, such as insurance, that were exempt.
In 2012, a new law allowed the vote to be moved to November. It was done under the auspices of saving money on paying for an election. Critics worried that board of education elections – which are already infested with politics – would become even more so because school board candidates would unofficially join a town council slate.
The Berkeley Times interviewed primary sponsor of the law, Shirley Turner (now a senator in District 12) in 2012, and she told this reporter that school board elections are already political and usually a stepping stone for municipal office.
The 2012 law stated that a town’s governing body or a school board can choose to move their elections from April to November to save money. If they do, they are also not required to hold a vote on the budget.
If the budget is under the 2 percent cap, voters won’t have a chance to approve or deny it. They will still have an opportunity to see it during a public hearing and it will still be reviewed by the office of the county superintendent, she said.
The 2012 legislation was a long time coming, she said. It started in 2000. Back then, the idea was that it was a mandatory change to November. This kept it from becoming law. When it was reworked to state that individual towns or school boards had the choice in the matter, it got majority approval and a signature from the governor.
School funding continued to have issues with a Sweeney-led change in 2018 that caused significant state aid cuts to many local schools. This new S-2 formula was never made public, despite lawsuits to make it public, so districts often had no way to plan for the cuts. In public statements, the people in charge of this plan said that districts weren’t taxing their residents enough.
Additionally, the 2% cap was still in effect. This left districts with huge budget holes: they lost millions in state aid, and couldn’t increase taxes to make up for it.
Last year, then-Governor Murphy signed a bill into law that allowed districts to surpass the 2% cap if they met certain criteria. They had to have received less state aid during the 2024-2025 school year than they did in the 2020-2021 school year. They were able to increase taxes to make up the difference to get them to that 2020-2021 level, however it still couldn’t be more than 9.9%, according to the New Jersey School Boards Association.
