The MCC Chargebacks and the FAIR Plan - more West Side pain
We got some new numbers in about the MCC chargeback aspect of the Brooks-Minarik F.A.I.R. plan, and guess what?
Surprise, surprise, it’s the West Side that takes the hit again…
The F.A.I.R. plan initiates a system of chargebacks for MCC attendance. This means that Monroe County will send each town a bill for their MCC students’ tuition.
Now, like everything else about this plan, it’s so complicated that you need an accountant to figure it out. Bear with me while I try to walk you through it. I’m going to use Greece as my example.
Greece has an MCC enrollment of 2,966 students. That’s 15.94% of the total enrollment at MCC. 15.94% of the total chargeback ($14.3 Million) is $2.28 Million - the total amount that Greece will have to pay back to the county for their MCC students.
How much extra in taxes will the average homeowner in Greece have to pay for the chargeback? Well, the 2006 real property full valuation for Greece was $4.55 Billion. Divide that by their chargeback bill ($2.28M) and you get a per-thousand rate of $0.5009 - about an additional fifty cents for each thousand dollars of assessed value. Those are the numbers shown on the map, and represent a kind of a ‘raw’ tax increase.
We can put it into more concrete terms: The average home in Greece is assessed at $111,500, so the average owner of that average home would have to pay an additional $55.85 in Town taxes to make up for the tax “cuts” in the F.A.I.R. plan.
How do some other average homeowners fare? The East Side comes out OK, not surprisingly. The average home in Brighton faces a tax increase of $35.72; in Pittsford, it’s $36.77.
But what about the West Side?
Parma: $70.67
Riga: $75.44
Chili: $77.31
Ogden: $80.97
Democrats, we can’t stress this strongly enough: It’s a shell game. The F.A.I.R. plan doesn’t lower taxes at all - it just pushes them off onto lower levels of government, and it does so in a way that pits one municipality against the next.
Remember that Dick Yolevich and Ray DiRaddo voted “yes” to these tax hikes, and did so against the best interests of their constituents. West Siders, these men aren’t representing you. They’re only looking out for their political careers - they’re afraid to cross Brooks and Minarik, and are unable to think for themselves. If they really had their acts together, they’d investigate the impacts of proposed legislation on their districts.
What if the County Executive and Boss Minarik hand them some legislation, and say “don’t worry… just sign it…. but do it quickly! We’ve only got 45 minutes to review it before the vote!” They should say no. They should stand up for their constituents - and stand up for democracy as well - and demand proper time to review the impacts of the proposed legislation.
By the way, this isn’t the only aspect of the Brooks-Minarik tax grab that disproportionally effects the West Side - or the only area where Yolevich and DiRaddo got screwed by the East Side cabal. Look below the fold to see how the School District map looks.
Read the article here.
Wow. Itchy. This is awesome. You did a fine job! I never understood why the county would “punish” towns for having the most students attending MCC.
May I have your permission to copy this and post it on Petrena’s blog?
It really was a lot of work to do this, but I appreciate it. Not everyone realizes the amount of money the county will get from this IN ADDITION to the intercept sham.
Sure, go ahead.
I suspect that the somewhat poorer westsiders will find it just a bit harder to get to college.
More generally thought college is being priced out of the range of the lower half of the middle class.
if anyone is interested One of the Reagan ed Bill Bennett type neo-cons Chester Finn once proposed a three tier system of higher education clearly based on status and wealth.
Higher education is clearly being restructured to re institute the old status orders. We need to be very careful in watching these trends
I don’t know if you are aware, but the current system of education in the US is largely based on the Prussian model from the 19th Century.
The system was developed after Napoleon defeated the Germans in the battle of Jena in 1806. The Germans decided that the reason they lost the battle was because the Prussian soldiers were thinking for themselves on the battlefield, instead of following orders.
Hence, the Prussian system focused on teaching children what should be learned, what they should think about, how long to think about it, and when a child should start thinking about something else.
The system consisted of three tiers. Most folks (~95%) were lumped into the bottom tier. An important purpose of this tier was to mystify higher knowledge, and make sure it was unclear how (and difficult) to acquire such knowledge independently. It was thought that to have an efficient policy-making class and a sub-class beneath it, you’ve got to remove the power of most people to learn (connect the dots) from available information. Of the remaining population, ~4% were taught some critical thinking skills, and less than 1% were taught how to question conventional thinking.
The whole purpose of the system was to create an educational pyramid, whereby certain knowledge and skills in critical thinking would be restricted to a small group citizens, to maintain social order and structure society to operate more efficiently.
The Prussian system began to be adopted in the US in the early 1800’s, as various dignataries from the northeastern US went to Germany to acquire graduate education. One of the reasons that these elite officials decided to adopt the Prussian system was to ensure a non-thinking workforce to staff the growing industrial revolution. The model was implemented in South after the civil war.
Obviously, so much has changed since then, and our system became more egalitarian in the 20th Century. Still, the basic structure of the educational system remains the same.
To make a long winded reply somewhat shorter, your concerns are well heeded.
How about the city? While the property tax increases might not effect city homeowners, the MCC chargeback certainly does.
I understand the concept of a user fee, and in some cases it makes a lot of sense, and in this case it might have made sense if there wasn’t already going to be a property tax increase.
At this point it looks like all we can do is hope and pray and some of the people in the suburbs decide maybe voting for Democrats wouldn’t be the end of the world.
The Democrats will have to spell it out for them because primarily conservative westsider bias prevents them from hearing it. Fear often causes people and regions to vote against their own self-interests. This plan affects the most vulnerable of suburbs but it might go unchecked because their love for all things Republican trumps truth. Sadly, the effects of this wallet wrangling will hurt the poorer kids, both in the short-term and the long-term.
“The Democrats will have to spell it out for them…”
Do you mean Democrats other than those on this website? If so….that would be….when?
Any minute now…
Ads, mailers, good old-fashioned phone calls, door-to-door pamphlets. No Republicans from the west side regularly read this website in large enough numbers to affect the election do they?
[...] a chart of something at the press Conference. That’s OK - that is where we come in - Like the MCC Chargeback graph or the unFAIR plan [...]
[...] discourse is by making local politics and policies understandable. We are proud to have created the maps showing clearly how the unFAIR plan would give everyone in Monroe County an effective tax [...]