Just
The One Boat
School's out, and it's certainly been a long semester for
the adults. Come fall, a new administration will be taking
over at Onteora, with trustees that have gotten some pretty
clear messages on fiscal accountability that we doubt will
be lost. We have a budget, maybe not the one most folks with
school age kids would have hoped for, but not the end of the
world. At the same time, the worst of the problems the district's
facing are still to come, and they'll be playing out right
through August, when most of us are usually hoping to decompress
a bit. That seems unlikely though, with the summer ahead promising
heat for sure but not necessarily light.
There's no question our towns have got some atypical stresses
compared to most, and topping the list, especially in Olive,
is the large parcel bill. Most people understand at
least, that looking at the issue from either Olive's or the
Shandaken-Woodstock viewpoint, everybody's got valid positions,
and a claim, some stronger than others, on issues of fairness.
Yes, Olive does have to do a reval because its equalization
rate is so out of sync with the rest of the district. But
the underlying issue here is that it's not the people's half
of Olive but the City's half of Olive that's the problem.
So regardless of how fast Olive completes its reval or where
its equalization rate ends up, until the assessed value of
the reservoir is fixed, the city's only paying about one third
the taxes it should be paying. And that continues because
that's how the New York State Office of Real Property Services
says it's going to continue. This newspaper herewith offers
a reward of two gallons of local maple syrup to anyone who
can tell us why that is.
One thing that's often missed here is that the reservoir valuation
doesn't just affect Olive financially, it affects taxpayers
in Shandaken and Woodstock and Hurley as well. If the City
were to start paying taxes on an assessed value of say, $360
million, it appears Shandaken's taxpayers would see their
school taxes drop over 8 percent, and Woodstock's over 11
percent, about the same direct benefit to those taxpayers
as enacting the large parcel bill. So if we don't enact
the large parcel bill and we keep the reservoir properties
within our local taxing authority, every town's taxpayers
will benefit when the City does finally have to pay fairly.
We're not saying that's an answer, but not factoring it in
just doesn't make sense.
The truth is that collectively and for a very long time, we
haven't been thinking very clearly about these tax issues,
because most of us, elected officials especially, think of
them as municipal problems limited by town boundaries. They
are that, but they're also issues whose solutions often lay
beyond those boundaries. And that's key if the good of the
whole community is what we're trying to achieve. Because working
collaboratively is the only way we can gather the influence
to solve some of these problems for each of our towns individually
and for our school district.
There are plenty of missed opportunities to look back at,
which we think validate this approach. In retrospect, Onteora
should have backed Olive on its reservoir fight - yes,
with money and lawyers - from day one, but nobody even talked
about that. In retrospect, maybe we shouldn't have signed
off on the MOA with the city, well, not in exchange for a
one-time $8. an acre anyway. Perhaps the time will come when
better compensation will be forthcoming. But the only prayer
of that is if we stand together as communities with common
issues, working for what we need.
For instance when Shandaken's finally ready to stop getting
run over by the State on the assessed value of its vast wilderness
and wild forest lands, it shouldn't have to try and get up
from the pavement alone; Olive and Woodstock should be there
as well: there's plenty of under-assessed state land there
too. All our towns should have been there when Hardenburgh,
population 208, tried to fight this battle alone a few years
back. If we'd stood with them then with our full faith and
moral credit and a combined legal fund, chances are all of
our towns would have benefited a hundredfold from a reasonable
negotiated solution. Instead, ORPS wiped the floor with Hardenburgh's
taxpayers, and they're doing it now with Olive, and Shandaken's
next on their list. That one's coming soon, and Shandaken
will need all the help on it that Olive never got from its
neighbors or its school district.
So our view is that Shandaken, Woodstock, and Hurley should
all be backing Olive in its fight for a fair valuation of
the reservoir properties, because that's a problem that right
now is costing every one of our taxpayers. And our school
district should be there too as a full partner in the issue,
which it certainly is. Just as it's also a full partner in
Shandaken's problem with ORPS on the assessment of state land.
Problem is, most people keep thinking oh that's Olive's problem
or that's Shandaken's problem and nobody's willing to even
try and think very far across town lines. And the longer we
let that continue, the longer we let state government and
other financially powerful interests divide and suppress our
municipal and communal interests, the more ineffectual we
end up at keeping our communities and our school districts
fiscally whole. It might just be that the silver lining in
the large parcel bill's dark cloud, is that people will start
to understand this at some point. But to do that, we're
going to have to stop thinking so reflexively, and really
consider whether the reactionary component of our communal
soul is serving us very well. Our take is it's not, because
it's what prevents us from creatively solving some of the
problems the big bad world out there keeps throwing at us.
We think home rule is critical to our future, but we're
not going to have any if we keep thinking home ends where
the backyard stops. It doesn't.
