| The December 6 1996, trial ruling by the Superior Court against the school districts | Page 49 |
Dr. Snow's miscalculations aside, common sense and the experience of the state's property tax payers can attest to the fact that a person taxed at the rate of $5.00 per thousand dollars of valuation enjoys a lower tax burden than the property owner who must pay a rate of $25.00 per thousand dollars of property value and that the fiscal capacity of a district is dependent upon its equalized property valuation.
The state's argument that the property tax rate is a function of income ignores state laws and state Department of Revenue Administration rules which provide that the tax bill a property owner receives is based on the value of his or her property, not income. If a person loses his or her job, the property tax bill must still be paid. If it is not paid, the town can place a lien and eventually force a sale of the property to pay the taxes.
State Categorical Aid Programs
At the onset of its analysis of Count II, the Court pointed out that nationally, states provide an average of approximately 50% of the costs of education to local districts. The state of New Hampshire annually provides approximately 8%, the lowest in the nation.
To justify its ruling that the state adequately funds public education with only a 8% contribution, the Superior Court accepted the state's claim that by giving local school districts the power to levy taxes to fund their schools, the state is ensuring that adequate funding will be available to support public education.
The state also claims its categorical aid programs, Foundation Aid, Building Aid, and Catastrophic Aid sufficiently supplement the state's "permitting" the school districts to pay for 90% of public education costs.
However categorical aid programs which come from the state's general revenue sources, are subject to rationing, depending upon the amount appropriated each year. The state may refuse to pay its bills and the districts do not have any recourse. No state statute requires the state to fund education. Instead the state has squarely placed the responsibility upon the districts to fund education.
The Superior Court, in agreeing with the state's position, refers to Tables 11 through 14, which were created by the state's statistics expert Paul Snow. Like the previously discussed Table 10, some of the tables contain numbers that he calculated exclusively for the litigation.
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