Archive: Opinions

Cutting the school tax for Lansing’s Elderly can significantly reduce the school tax burden on Lansing’s taxpayers.

The traditional (stable) community model:

This community was traditionally composed almost entirely of long term residents. The parents of graduating school children would continue to stay in town and give back to the community by helping to subsidize the school costs of others. This is no longer the case in Lansing.

The current (unstable) community model:

For many parents, the often spoken phrase, “Lansing is a great place to bring up my kids,” is coupled with the unspoken one, “But I’m leaving town when my kids graduate college.”

Indeed, the Lansing School taxes are so high that very few people move to Lansing these days without the intention of leaving as soon as their family can no longer benefit from the school system.

It’s this cycle of an ever-increasing school tax burden, coupled with an ever decreasing pool of long term residents that has destabilized the community of Lansing. And it’s exactly this cycle that the current Lansing School tax structure promotes.

A workable solution: Enact a 25% school tax cut for those residents with no children in school, and an additional 25% (50% total) school tax cut for those residents over 65 with no children in school.

As a simplified example: when we take the total Lansing school tax and divide it by the current number of students, we show a yearly cost of about $13,000 per student. If we then assume that the school tax on a residence is $3,000, and use the above school tax reduction plan we arrive at the following results for the year: A tax payment of $2,250 on a residence with no children in school, and a $1,500 tax payment on a residence with no children in school and residents over 65 years of age. In both of these cases the school tax flow is a positive one.

Now compare the result of this same residence being sold to a family with one child in the Lansing School System: The $3,000 tax payment would be offset by a $13,000 tax liability, so the school would need an additional $10,000 in taxes just to break even. (And any additional students at the residence would require an extra $13,000 in taxes per student.)

It’s clear that encouraging Lansing’s long time residents to stay in Lansing is a practical way to both maintain the high quality of Lansing’s schools, and to reverse the debilitating school tax spiral.

This school tax reduction also would encourage families to stay in town, knowing that when they retire, they will be able to afford to continue to live in Lansing. It would even attract retired and single people without school children, and this would add greatly to the stability of the tax base and the stability of the community.

An alternative solution: There has been an ongoing campaign to sell the idea of a Lansing “Center” with a nebulous “in-fill residential development” phrase attached.

This sewer-driven development deal, poised in the shadows to bring hundreds of “higher-density” housing units to South Lansing (i.e. the Village of Lansing apartment complexes) is intended to meet the County’s housing needs, and all the Town’s needs, “while simultaneously promoting a sense of community in this town center area.”

It’s a pretty picture, but the frame’s too small - It doesn’t show the increased school taxes due to the many new students this (and the other proposed developments) will bring to Lansing, or the costs of the new schools which will soon be needed to accommodate them.

As a matter of fact, its proponents have repeatedly and flatly refused to provide any figures or projections on the school tax impact of this planned development, and all of their statements and exhortations omit any mention of this “deal-breaking” tax liability. As they say in the vernacular, “Do I need to draw you a diagram?”

There was an open meeting presenting the NRP Group LLC’s proposal to develop a Lansing Town Center on Wednesday, February 19.

Conclusion:  The School Tax Reduction Plan outlined above would require no additional taxes, no residential or commercial development of Town land, no Town Center, no sewers, and no rezoning.

The benefits of this program could be shown with real demographics and costs, instead of reliance on the questionable pie-in-the-sky claims for future business and housing development projects.

This plan promotes the sort of “in-fill” that Lansing really needs - an in-fill of long-term residents whose presence will reverse the ongoing erosion of Lansing’s tax base and make it a vital, sustainable community.

Sincerely,

Doug Baird
Lansing