OPINION

Essay: Still waiting on mandate relief

Brian Sampson

By most measures, New Yorkers pay the highest property taxes in the nation. In 2011 we capped them and in 2014 we “froze” them, yet we’ve done virtually nothing to address our tax burden’s core cost drivers — unfunded state mandates.

Unfunded mandates are state rules that local governments must obey and administer but are provided no funding to do so. They fuel the cost of government and keep it high in perpetuity. They siphon precious and scarce resources away from the classrooms, infrastructure and community development projects that are desperately needed in Rochester and other upstate urban centers. The worst of them serve to protect a failed status quo at the expense of student achievement, community stability, employment opportunities and economic mobility.

Education is and always has been the great equalizer. A robust and dynamic public education system is the surest way to empower the impoverished and provide income stability throughout a community.

In New York we spend more than any other state in the nation on K-12 education — close to $20,000 per year per student — yet student achievement outcomes are mediocre at best.

Too much of the money supposedly being spent on students never sees the inside of a classroom; it’s never spent on textbooks, calculators or art supplies. The reason New York pays twice the national average in per-student education costs is an insane series of mandates intended to improve the bargaining position of union leaders and protect institutionally broken systems.

New York’s infamous Triborough Amendment guarantees public employee raises even after a contract’s expiration. When pay raises and generous fringe benefits guaranteed to public employees are predetermined, where is the incentive for public labor unions to negotiate good-faith contracts that respect the fiscal limitations of taxpayers, but more importantly, focus available resources on the actual needs of students?

Combine this with archaic public construction mandates like the Scaffold Law and Project Labor Agreements, both of which needlessly multiply construction costs for the schools, parks, housing and infrastructure needed to develop stable communities, while at the same time, create barriers for minority- and women-owned firms trying to obtain public construction contracts.

We have formed a coalition, Let NY Work: A Common Agenda For The Common Good, with leaders from the business community, education and municipal government whose aim is to bring reform to New York’s mandate problem. It’s long past time that we fix the laws that protect and insulate a failing system. It’s time to finally provide superintendents, school districts, local officials and the taxpaying public with the flexibility and financial freedom needed to actually forge solutions to the fundamental problems that continue to hold our state and our city back.

Sampson is executive director of Unshackle Upstate.

‘The reason New York pays twice the national average in per-student education costs is an insane series of mandates.’