GUILDERLAND — The school board here had an impassioned discussion on how much of a tax break to grant residents who are elderly or disabled with limited incomes but reached no conclusion.

The board will take up the matter at its January meeting.

The state legislature amended the Real Property Tax Law to allow school districts and municipalities to raise the income ceiling for exemptions.

Last October, the town of Guilderland went to the maximum for senior citizens and the next month did the same for residents with disabilities. No residents spoke at either public hearing.

Guilderland Supervisor Peter Barber said at the time, “Why doesn’t this stay up with inflation? Why do we do this every 17 years?”

Also in October 2023, Councilman Jacob Crawford said the new higher income ceiling could create “opportunities for seniors to stay in this community that they’ve helped build.”

Town taxes make up roughly 12 percent of Guilderland property taxes while the school taxes are the lion’s share.

Albany County offered the same exemptions, at the ceiling maximum, a year ago.

The Guilderland school district currently offers both exemptions at what had been the previous ceiling.

No matter what exemption the school district decides to offer, the tax levy would remain the same. To make up the difference for the exemption, other property owners in town would pay more.

The previous ceiling was an income of $29,000 for a 50-percent exemption.

The new maximum allowed by the state is $50,000 for a 50-percent exemption. The percentage of the exemption decreases as the income increases so that someone with an annual income of $58,400 would get a 5-percent exemption.

The school board’s Business Practices Committee put forth a proposal that the ceiling be raised from the current $29,000 to $35,000 rather than to the allowed $50,000.

To qualify for the exemption, seniors generally must be 65 years of age or older and a disabled person must have a physical or mental impairment — not due to current use of alcohol or illegal drugs — that limits their ability to care for themselves, or to perform manual tasks, walk, see, hear, speak, breathe, learn, or work.

Melissa Wood, an assessment clerk for Guilderland, clarified for The Enterprise that the threshold numbers apply to an individual if that person is living alone but, for a couple sharing a household, the incomes are combined.

Heartfelt deliberation

At the Guilderland School Board’s Dec. 10 meeting, Assistant Superintendent for Business Andrew Van Alstyne told the board, “Other districts have adopted this but not to the point where I’ve been able to get data from them about the impact … The ones I talked to most frequently did a partial increase and the ones that did the full increase had not calculated yet the impact.”

Board member Rebecca Butterfield asked for a “rough estimate” of the impact.

Van Alstyne responded by comparing these exemptions to an exemption the school board had granted for volunteer first responders.

“For the average household … that tax impact was in the single dollars …,” he said of the exemption for firefighters. “If we did the full exemption [for seniors and people with disabilities] it would likely be in the tens of dollars annually. But, beyond that, I can’t really estimate,” he said.

Van Alstyne also said, “My strong recommendation would be that, if we do one, we do the other.”

He added that the number of disabled residents who would qualify would be far fewer than the number of seniors.

Meredith Brière, who serves on the Business Practices Committee, explained her reasoning to the board for suggesting the $35,000 ceiling in the first place.

“We have a high level [of residents] below the poverty line in this district …,” she said. “We have a high number of renters and we have to remember, when giving exemptions, those tax implications end up on the entire population including renters because rents will go up.”

Bringing the ceiling up to $50,000, she said, “just seemed really high” while at the same time $29,000 “is really a difficult number to live on.”

She went on, “So we came to a compromise of $35,000.”

At the other end of the sliding scale, with this compromise, someone with an annual income of $43,399 would get a 5-percent break.

Butterfield said, “My worry is, there are people, homeowners, who are living below the poverty line who are not seniors and are not disabled … In our zeal to be the most equitable as possible, are we maybe not the most equitable as possible?”

To come up with the $35,000 ceiling, Brière explained, “I looked at the federal poverty limit and I doubled it and added a few thousand dollars because it’s so little. You cannot live on those numbers.

“I actually talked to a few seniors after the committee meeting and those that were in the lowest income bracket were thankful that we were having the discussion but also thought that a $50,000 number, they would be incredibly thankful to have that and said they would pay their fair share of taxes gladly if that was the number that they actually brought in. So hearing that really helped me feel better about the decision that I made to be so vocal about it.”

Brière  also noted that the state’s School TAx Relief program, known as STAR, gives people 65 and older on limited incomes relief without shifting the burden to other property owners in the district.

Butterfield, a pediatrician, said that child poverty is statistically higher than senior poverty.

Brière noted that the added tax-levy increase on a $250,000 house in the school district would be “something like 50 dollars.”

“I would gladly pay 50 extra dollars a year to help alleviate seniors’ poverty level,” Brière said to Butterfield, “but not at the expense, like you said, of children. So it’s an emotional thing as well as a financial, statistical thing and it’s a difficult question, but I think leaving it at $29,000 is like saying, ‘we’re OK with your being in poverty.’”

The board’s vice president, Kelly Person, who also serves on the Business Practices Committee, said, “I’m so glad Meredith brought this up because we were leaning to “yes, we want to this” and then she brought up all these points and we’re like, ‘Oh, that’s a really good point’ and we settled on this $35,000.”

Tara Molloy-Grocki, another board member who serves on the Business Practices Committee, said, “It’s a hard decision because we did talk a lot about childhood poverty. We talked a lot about low-income families, Section 8 housing. And, while I agree with Meredith that seniors are on a fixed income, it’s still hard … fifty dollars can go towards food or new shoes or something. So I don’t know.”

Board member Nina Kaplan suggested holding off on raising the income ceiling to “see where things go … given inflation and other economic factors that are external and have basically affected everybody.”

“Some of our taxpayers, some of our families literally don’t have 50 dollars to spare … They can’t pay for lunch for their kids. My heart says, ‘yeah, absolutely,’” board President Blanca Gonzalez-Parker said of granting the further exemption. “But I have to think about the other folks that this would impact.”

The board will take up the matter at its next meeting, on Jan. 14.

The paperwork to raise the ceiling has to be submitted by March 1.