April 28, 2018. Newly endorsed Working Families Parties candidate for New York governor, Cynthia Nixon, discusses how the state’s two percent spending cap and two percent spending property tax cap causes problems for education and government services. She says that the two percent spending cap shrinks the budget every year, causing major impacts to public education and local governments in the form of budget cuts. Frank Mauro, former executive director of the Fiscal Policy Institute, along with several other organizations, comments that the two percent cap is a problem given that the economy is doing well.
Frank Mauro, former executive director of the labor-based Fiscal Policy Institute, said the layoffs and painful cuts seen at some school districts and local governments that Nixon cites were predictable under the caps.
“Last week there was a headline that a school district was cutting 13 positions, so in a time when the economy is supposed to be doing pretty well, that’s a pretty counter-intuitive situation,” Mauro said. “I think the 2 percent property tax cap has very uneven impacts because . . . school districts that had a well-funded program could maybe live within the cap, but for a school that had to catch up, the 2 percent cap has become very problematic.”
Here is the link to Newsday.