Many school boards were reluctant to offer a tax break for veterans allowed by the state this year, saying they were forced to choose between veterans and non-veterans and, after the governor signed it into law, they were already in the process of making their budgets. But the law drew another line that state legislators are hoping to erase.

Opening their bills from the school district, the largest single property tax, this fall, some older veterans found they didn’t get the break. The bill extended section 458-a of New York State's Real Property Tax Law, giving school districts the option to adopt the Alternative Veterans’ Tax Exemption, not the less common Eligible Funds Exemption or the Cold War Veterans Exemption.

“The committee focused on 458-a because it captured a larger amount of veterans,” said Sharon Grobe, legislative director for the sponsor of the Assembly bill, Michael Cusik, a Democrat from Staten Island. Of another veterans’ exemption not being included, Grobe said, “They wanted to verify that it was still a viable exemption and how many it would capture. We probably would not have been able pass a bill into law that did it all at once,” said Grobe, noting the Senate did not pass the extension of the Alternative Veterans’ Exemption for several years.

The same legislators behind that bill introduced a similar one in the last legislative session that would apply to school taxes the Eligible Funds Exemption — a break that can be very large for some, granted to veterans who bought their property with specific funds related to their military service.

The original idea for expanding the exemptions to school taxes was proposed in a resolution by Anthony Avella, now a state senator, when he was a New York City councilman several years ago.

Senator Cecilia Tkaczyk, a Democrat whose district includes most of Albany County, sat last year on the committee for Veterans, Homeland Security and Military Affairs and voted in favor of the bill allowing schools to extend the Alternative Veterans' Exemption.

The bills don’t automatically give veterans tax breaks. They put the choice of offering the exemption in the hands of local school boards, as the law does for municipal ones, and veterans without exemptions have to apply for them by the March 1 deadline.

Expanding the tax exemptions for schools further may be even more controversial, as many school boards opposed or postponed acting on the option this year, calling it an “unfunded mandate.”

In his oft-used response to a mention of taxpayers’ burden, “I’ll trade places with them any day,” Ed Ackroyd said, an Army veteran who was disabled in the Vietnam War. Ackroyd pushed this year for the Berne-Knox-Westerlo School Board to offer the exemption and for the Knox Town Board to increase the maximum dollar amount for its exemption.

When the school-tax bills were mailed this fall, Ackroyd got a call from the daughter of a World War II veteran who said her widowed mother didn’t receive the exemption. Ackroyd said he asked local assessors why and was told the widow would have to apply for the alternative exemption to get it next year.

If they apply, veterans with eligible funds exemptions can have the alternative exemption for school taxes only. But Ackroyd says few veterans are aware of their options.

“I explained to them, some of them don’t have until next year. When some of them are on Social Security, limited means — they could use these deductions,” said Ackroyd.

He, along with commanders of the local posts for the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars, believes those veterans who didn’t get the exemption this year should be reimbursed as if they had the exemption in the past year, if not from school budgets, from the state budget.

Harvey McCagg, legislative chair for the American Legion Department of New York, believes retroactive action from the legislature is unlikely, especially since school districts followed the law as it was enacted.

“If the law is changed, it would be nice to have happen for those veterans, but the practicality of it is it would most likely not happen because it would be creating an additional tax burden on the school districts, who by now would be into their second, or possibly even third, year of cycling through this thing and having to pay it back,” said McCagg.

The Eligible Funds Exemption, first created as section 458 of the Real Property Tax Law in 1897, is used more often by surviving veterans of World War II. Since it uses a maximum dollar amount, a high or low property assessment can change the percentage of the exemption for a given veteran.

“One of the acknowledged inequities of section 458 is that veterans of different eras have had markedly different amounts of eligible funds made available to them,” says a legal opinion by the tax department on section 458, describing how veterans of wars in Korea and Vietnam did not get the kinds of bonus money that came after World War II and would be considered “eligible funds.”

In 1984, the Alternative Veterans’ Exemption was enacted, allowing property owners with eligible funds exemptions to hold onto them, even if the local tax jurisdiction had adopted the new exemption.

Locally, Berne-Knox-Westerlo and Guilderland school boards passed resolutions to offer the Alternative Veterans’ Exemption for the 2014-15 budget, setting the maximums for its separate categories at the basic level of $12,000 for wartime service, an additional $8,000 for serving in a combat zone, and an additional $40,000 for service-related disabilities. The Voorheesville School Board has not acted on the exemption.

The Eligible Funds Exemption was the first of its kind, allowing an exemption for veterans who bought their properties with pension bonus or insurance money, dividends or refunds from insurance, compensation for being a prisoner of war, or money through the Mustering-out Payment Act of 1944.