Representative Mauree Gingrich’s recent column in the Lebanon Daily News (“Search will go on for a better way” – February 10, 2008) is filled with factual inaccuracies and omissions, constituting an attempt to deceive the voters in her District regarding her position on school property taxes.

The clear intent of her column is to try and convince her constituents that her vote against Republican Representative Sam Rohrer’s House Bill-1275, the School Property Tax Elimination Act of 2007, is beneficial to her constituents.

Even worse, she then proudly implies that her vote for former Speaker of the House John Perzel’s bill is a good thing because, according to Gingrich, Perzel’s proposal “…..Eliminates property taxes for income-eligible senior citizens while not raising or shifting taxes.” 

Her explanations omit numerous important considerations and thus are grossly misleading. Her constituents need to know at least the following: 

The Democrat and Republican leaders of the House do not want to replace school property taxes with a broad-based sales tax because of intense lobbying by special-interest constituencies, such as lawyers, accountants, advertising and public relations agencies and the Democrat’s all-powerful teachers’ union. Ample evidence of this opposition is the subject of a separate discussion. 

Suffice it to say that the present House leaders, Republicans John Perzel and Sam Smith, and Democrats, Bill DeWeese and Keith McCall, do not care what property taxpaying voters want. They are in the pockets of special interest groups, which is why this issue is not being seriously addressed. 

Rohrer’s HB-1275 was, as Gingrich says, overwhelmingly rejected because the Democrats almost unanimously voted against this proposal and were joined by the Republican leaders and their supporters, like Gingrich, for the reasons explained above. What Gingrich did not tell her constituents is that a bi-partisan, reform-minded coalition of 47 Republicans and Democrats voted in favor of Rohrer’s School Property Tax Elimination Act. Locally, Representative RoseMarie Swanger had the courage to buck the Perzel/Smith leadership and vote in favor of eliminating school property taxes.

Using political demagoguery, Gingrich implies that replacing school property taxes with a broad-based sales tax would be bad because the costs of selected goods and services would be slightly more expensive. She uses emotionally-sensitive examples like day-care and funerals, but readers should note that she fails to mention that taxpayers purchasing these services would no longer be paying the most regressive and punitive type of tax……the school property tax, which can take away a person’s place to live if the tax is not paid by a certain  date.

For average, low-income, home-owning families, there is no question that replacing school property taxes with a broad-based sales tax as contemplated by Rohrer’s HB-1275, will benefit such property owners, because under his plan, the costs that consume the majority of disposable income of this class of voters: food, clothing, medically-necessary expenses and residential shelter (homes) will be exempt from the expanded sales tax.  Conveniently, Gingrich does not mention this fact.

Gingrich erroneously states that Rohrer’s proposal “…Would … produce only $9.2 billion to replace the $15.5 billion currently generated through property taxes.” Her $15.5 billion number is believed to include county and municipal property tax amounts. Rohrer’s proposal does not apply to these taxes, which are not used for school district educational purposes and Gingrich knows or should know this. The generally accepted figures for total school property taxes are $7 billion for homesteads/farmsteads and $3 billion for a 50% reduction for businesses, a total of $10 billion.  This is the amount that is anticipated to be generated by Rohrer’s HB-1275.

Gingrich’s attack on the amount of school district debt to be assumed under Rohrer’s proposal is way off base. She demagogues this aspect of the proposal by claiming that her constituents will be paying for Philadelphia school district indebtedness, but does not mention the significant indebtedness just incurred by  the Palmyra and Annville/Cleona school districts which would be covered by Rohrer’s proposal. 

Her debt-assumption claims are naïve and irrelevant, because the provisions of HB-1275 are intended to account for all current education expenditure obligations, including debt service.

Next, Gingrich brags about her vote in favor of Perzel’s proposal to, as Gingrich said, “…… Eliminate property taxes for income-eligible senior citizens while not raising or shifting taxes”. What Gingrich did not tell her constituents, is that the majority of “income-eligible senior citizens” she refers to already have a rent and property tax rebate program available to them and that Perzel’s proposal would take away every other homeowner’s school property tax reduction for 2008 and all future years. In other words, she supports taking all of the slots-gambling money promised to ALL homeowners in the state for property tax relief and giving this money to a certain class of senior citizens who are already entitled to property tax relief.

Perzel’s proposal is nothing more than an election-year ploy and one of his many efforts to maneuver himself back to power as Speaker of the House. When Perzel was the all-powerful Speaker of the House, he made no attempt to bring about  elimination of school property taxes. But he ram-rodded both slots-gambling legislation and the now infamous pay-raise legislation through the then Republican-controlled House. Also, Perzel has not returned the unconstitutional pay-raise money he accepted prior to the repeal of the pay raise.

Gingrich’s constituents should know that she has consistently voted for both  Perzel and  Sam Smith as leaders of the House Republicans. She voted for Perzel for Speaker as recently as January 2, 2007. Gingrich’s son also works for the Republican Caucus, further tying her allegiances to the Republican leaders. This is nepotism and a conflict of interest.

Representative Gingrich says that school property taxes ”Place an unfair burden on homeowners, not just for our struggling seniors but for every property owner”. She says that “total property tax elimination is a noble goal” and that “most of us would like to see a total elimination of school property taxes”. But nowhere in her lengthy column does she tell her constituents what her plan is to achieve this goal. She doesn’t even say what methodology she favors.

She rightly condemns the ever-escalating costs of public education, which cause the ever-escalating school property taxes, but she does not say what measures she would take to reduce costs. Indeed, her record as a legislator is devoid of any meaningful effort to reduce such costs. 

In conclusion, Gingrich’s column intentionally presents a slanted, factually-inaccurate, misleading presentation concerning the pocket-book issue most important to the average homeowner in her District. One can only conclude that this presentation was designed to mislead her constituents in an election year.

 In almost six years in office, Gingrich has not made a single proposal to reduce the ever-escalating costs of K-12 public education, not a single proposal to provide a more equitable funding mechanism for disparate school districts and not a single proposal to eliminate the regressive, archaic, unfair and ever-increasing school property tax. In short, Gingrich has done nothing to help solve the problems she acknowledges exist. She would not even co-sponsor Rohrer’s HB-1275 or try and work with Rohrer and the other reform-minded members of the bi-partisan coalition supporting the elimination of school property taxes. She sided with leadership, not with reform.

Ken Schaefer is chairman of Vote For Integrity based in Lebanon County, PA.

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