Connor Rigney
Graduate Student, M.R.P. '22
Public School Districts and Their Role in Tax Abatement Implementation: Lessons from New York and Ohio
Property Taxes make up the lion’s share of school district revenue across the United States, tying school funding directly to the property wealth of their district. Thus, we sought to clarify the local school district’s power over their own tax base. That is, school districts uniformly have the power to raise levies to augment district revenues, but how much power do they have over when local economic development coalitions give away their tax base through property tax abatements to incentivize new industrial development? We conducted interviews with state and city stakeholders in both New York State, where Industrial Development Authorities set the standard for local economic development policy, and in Ohio, where cities and corporations drive the bus to characterize the degree to which districts have the power to approve, deny, or modify abatement requests.
