DEPARTING SCHOOL BOARD MEMBER BENNETT TAKES ON STATE AID IN BLOG, MAY RUN FOR SCHOOL BOARD AGAIN

School Board member Jeffrey Bennett may be leaving the Board of Education after his term is up this year, but do not think he is backing off from education issues.

And he says he may run for the school board again "in about 10 years."

Bennett has been writing a blog related to education for nearly a year. Titled: New Jersey Education Aid at http://njeducationaid.blogspot.com/, the site focuses on many of the problems with state aid to our districts.

His latest post, The Problems of PILOTS, takes issue with these Payments In Lieu Of Taxes, the newest tool of districts and municipalities to reduce property taxes for new or specific development projects through what is essentially a re-named tax abatement.

Writes Bennett:

 Let's say that you could enroll in a program where you would receive somewhat lower compensation at work, but get that compensation tax free or at a reduced rate and thus come out with higher net earnings.  Let's say this "PILOS" program - Payment In Lieu Of Salary - was originally intended to help less-employable people but there were no restrictions on who could enroll, including people who had no trouble getting a job.
Let's say that in addition to getting all of that money tax-free your money was invisible to the Department of Human Services, so that not only could you get all this money tax-free, but you could also benefit from food stamps, welfare, and Medicaid?
Sounds pretty good, right? Well a program like this for salaries is fiction, but New Jersey has a real tax abatement program just like it for development called the "Payments in Lieu of Taxes" (PILOTs) and the costs to state taxpayers are becoming increasingly high.
In a PILOT agreement a property owner pays no regular taxes at all on a building. The owner does pay a Payment in Lieu of Taxes to the municipality (5% goes to the county), but nothing goes to the schools. In a hot real estate area the PILOT payment can be as high as regular taxes would have been, but with 95% to the municipality and 5% to the county instead of a more even division between the three governments.

Bennett, who has chosen not to run for re-election this year, has a history of fighting for better school state aid for our district. He recently raised the issue of hiring a lobbyist to demand more state aid and pulling out of the Garden State Coalition of Schools.

Asked about the blog, Bennett said via email, "I plan on continuing to update the blog after I leave the board, although I'll probably fall off the one-post-a-day pace. Since I will be a public school parent myself in a few years I plan on being very involved in local education period.  I would even like to run again for the BOE in about ten years."