Careful, that vote's loaded
Yesterday, Albany voters defeated the school budget for the second year in a row. As usual, when questioned, most of the people voting against it said they were voting against it because "our taxes are already too high."
It is true that city taxes are high. There are many reasons for this, one of which I wrote about in a recent column. And we don't get to vote directly on many things that affect them. We don't get to vote directly on the city budget, or the amount of state revenue sharing, or the property tax rules, or the potential fiscal boondoggle of a convention center, or the police union contract, or the huge number of charter schools sucking money from our public schools, or the fire fighters' health care and pension plans. But we do get to vote on the school budget, and so it bears the brunt of our pocketbooks' pain.
Now, I don't think the school budget should be rubber stamped. If you think there is a serious problem with it-supertintedent paid too much, too many frills in a new school building, too much/not enough money devoted to afterschool programs/sports/foreign language, whatever-something you're convinced is bad enough that they should be forced back to the drawing board, by all means, vote against it.
But this budget proposal was a mild increase over last year's barely-more-than-contingency second try. It contained judicious cuts, and also mandated increases due to accounting changes and charter schools and state rules, and a few increases for well-proven and much needed academic and literacy programs. I certainly didn't find it ambitious or reckless. It's hard to imagine what they would cut.
What does it mean to walk into a voting booth and vote "no" on that because your taxes are too high? What exactly do you expect to happen next?
I sometimes wonder if we get so used to our vote not seeming to matter on the national scale that we forget that on small local matters like this, there's no such thing as a symbolic protest vote. This budget defeat is going to have real consequences for the city's children.
But even if you really care about your taxes above the quality of education the city's children receive, this seems like a foolhardy long-term move. If we destroy our schools, more people will leave the city, leaving fewer of us to shoulder an increased tax burden. It's hardly a cost savings.