School boards take aim at PILOTs

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On Oct. 14, District 13 Trustee Toni Pomerantz proposed that the New York State School Boards Association lobby for a change to state municipal law to allow school board members to strike down Industrial Development Agency provisions that would affect school taxes. Since then, lobbyists for the association have been meeting with state lawmakers about the proposed change.

“I think these are all the areas that are of importance to our delegates,” said Brian Fessler, the NYSSBA’s deputy director for government relations.

The school boards association, the state lobbying group that represents more than 600 school districts, meets annually to discuss state laws and how they affect boards of education. Each school board sends a representative to propose a change to state law that it believes the association should lobby for. The representatives then votes on whether the various proposals are worthy causes for the association to take up. If a proposal passes, the association has five years to lobby for it, after which the proposal can be voted on again.

According to Fessler, lobbyists for the organization will ask state legislators to allow school board members to strike down any provision of a payment-in-lieu of taxes, or PILOT, agreement that would adversely affect school taxes.

“They still have a right to issue the PILOT,” said Bill Stris, the president of the District 13 Board of Education, referring to members of an Industrial Development Agency. “We can just tell them the impact it would have on a school district.”

A PILOT agreement could still go into effect, Fessler explained, without the provisions about school taxes. “It’s not giving the school district superpowers to strike down an agreement,” he said. Fessler did not specify how the veto power would work, and said that the school boards association would discuss the plan with lawmakers.

According to Stris, Pomerantz proposed the resolution on behalf of District 13 because the district was not notified when the Town of Hempstead IDA granted the Green Acres Mall a $6 million tax break in 2015. In April the IDA voted to revoke the agreement, asserting that Macerich, the mall’s California-based owner, failed to create jobs. As a result, Macerich sued the IDA and will appear in court on Dec. 15.

The tax breaks from the PILOT agreement reduced the taxable property in District 30, which increased taxes in each of the elementary districts.

“We had no say,” Stris said. “All of a sudden, we get notified that there was a raise … So we want a seat at the table.”

Bill Heidenreich, the high school district superintendent, said he was not surprised that other school districts throughout the state supported District 13’s resolution. “It’s a very common-sense thing that school boards should be involved in PILOT decisions,” he said.