When Board of Supervisors chair Bill Federice put looking at how Schoharie County shares sales tax revenues on his 2022 to-do list, he was stepping into history that goes back nearly 40 years.
“Does it still work? Do we want to do it differently?” Mr. Federice asked when he named Wright Supervisor Alex Luniewski to head up a committee to try to find the answers.
Those were the same questions supervisors asked in 1984, when according to a January 25 Times-Journal article, they voted in a two percent county sales tax—and kept it all.
Supervisors voted to put all of the ’84 sales tax revenues toward what would become the new County Office Building.
After that, 25 percent would go into a building fund and 75 percent would go to the county budget to reduce property taxes “in a way that was both fair and easily administered.”
“Real property can no longer bear the burden of supporting county government,” said Carlisle Supervisor Art Graulich, Finance Committee chair in 1984.
“Real property taxes are making owning property a luxury.”
At the time, the state sales tax was four percent.
“It goes to Albany, where we wonder what became of it,” said supervisors’ chair, the late Stewart Mace of Gilboa after the vote.
“At least the new two percent will remain in Schoharie County, where it will pay for services.”
At supervisors’ February 18, 2022 meeting, Fulton Supervisor Phil Skowfoe said the details of the sales tax distribution were never intended to be carved in stone.
And he’s right.
In 1996, the late Cobleskill Supervisor Frank Reilly led efforts to start sharing revenue from what had become a three percent sales tax with towns and villages based on property values and equalization rates.
An August 16, 1996 resolution laid out the plan; if sales tax revenues exceeded 102 percent of what was budgeted, 75 percent of the “excess” would be shared with the towns and villages.
That resolution expired on April 1, 2000, and in an October 20, 2000 resolution, supervisors amended it, voting to distribute three percent of sales tax revenues to municipalities.
Three years later, in November 2003, supervisors agreed to raise the sales tax by one percent so they could hold the line on property taxes in their 2004 budget.
They also agreed to increase the amount going to towns and village from three to five percent effective June 1, 2004; that’s what they’re getting now.
“We don’t know if it’s equitable or not,” said County Treasurer Mary Ann Wollaber-Bryan, because just about every other county in the state does it differently.
“Is there a more equitable way? I don’t know.”
According to a 2020 summary from the State Comptroller’s Office, some counties share a portion of the sales tax based on population, others share it based on property values, while still others use a combination of the two.
Nearly a dozen—Franklin, Greene, Hamilton, Lewis, Alleghany, Delaware, Putnam, Seneca, Sullivan, Wyoming, and Yates Counties—keep it all.
In 2021, the county sales tax raised nearly $19.5 million, a $2.7 million or 16 percent increase over 2020.
Interestingly, in 1984, supervisors also considered two other options for raising revenues: a countywide income tax and Off Track Betting.
The income tax would have required special legislation and was rejected as difficult to enforce.
OTB was discarded as having too small an impact on the county’s needs.
Eventually, OTB was put on the November 2004 ballot, where it failed 2-1.