‘Millionaire’s tax must be extended’

Betsy Sandberg

UFT President Michal Mulgrew also asked for state funding for Teacher Centers.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew offered lawmakers a solid and sensible plan for facing the state’s economic challenges without hurting students during a joint legislative hearing on the governor’s proposed education budget on Feb. 15 in Albany.

A key part of the plan was extending the millionaire’s tax, which is due to expire at the end of the year. Letting it lapse will cost New York $1 billion this year and almost $5 billion next year.

“The wealthiest, including the Wall Street bankers and brokers who should be taking some responsibility for having caused this recession, are not being asked to sacrifice at all,” Mulgrew said. “This is unacceptable. The last thing they need is a tax break.”

Mulgrew also called for:

• Curtailing the New York City Department of Education’s $1 billion addition to the capital budget for technology upgrades, including $50 million alone for data management consultants;
• Scrutinizing the DOE’s $6 billion in expenditures on outside vendor contracts — saving just 5 percent on these could put $300 million back into classrooms, he noted;
• Collection of $572 million in taxes owed the state;
• Filing reimbursement claims for the $300-$600 million owed to schools by Medicaid for services provided; and
• A retirement incentive for city teachers, which would save hundreds of millions of dollars.

Mulgrew also asked for the restoration of state funding for Teacher Centers.

This past year, the union stepped forward to fund the city’s Teacher Centers after their funding was cut from last year’s state budget. That move, Mulgrew said, “required us to cut back on other staff and programs as well as use our reserves. We do not have that option next year.”

The centers, which offer professional development in 175 school-based sites and numerous outreach locations, were a core factor in New York securing federal Race to the Top funds, Mulgrew said. They proved New York had an infrastructure in place to deliver changes.

Eliminating them, he said, could put the state’s Race to the Top grant in jeopardy.

Mulgrew described a city school system in which classrooms have been cut to the bone.

Students and teachers have lost critical classes and activities, he said. Some 5,000 teachers plus 700 other educators have left and not been replaced in the past two years. Class sizes have increased over the past three years “even as three-quarters of a billion dollars in state-mandated class-size reduction funds disappeared without a trace into the Tweed bureaucracy,” Mulgrew said.

He said UFT members have also sacrificed, making modifications to educator pensions a year and a half ago that translate into $100 million in savings each year.

“What makes the situation even more egregious is that the same millionaires and billionaires who are fighting against paying their fair share are the ones spreading lies about workers’ pensions and ignoring the hard work that has already been done to create savings,” he said. “The millionaires want you to ignore the fact that the recklessness of the financial community created the country’s economic collapse.”

Even as the recession lingers for most New Yorkers, profits and personal bonuses on Wall Street are setting new records, he noted. “The top 1 percent of city households average $3.7 million, or an income of $10,137 a day — what the bottom 10 percent lives on for a year,” he said.

He urged state lawmakers not to “fall for” the opportunistic efforts by the mayor and Chancellor Cathie Black, who testified earlier that day, to change seniority layoff rules that guarantee impartiality.

The mayor’s layoff threat, Mulgrew said, is “a strategy of pitting parents against parents, teachers against teachers, and communities against communities.”

“If adults don’t respect teachers, how will children respect them?” asked Manhattan Assemblywoman Deborah Glick.