Just taaake the moneeeys

Earlier in the year Ben Kleban proposed an across the board freeze on the school board granting these kinds of tax breaks now that they have the discretion to do that. Instead they're considering each request individually so the schools can continue to die by a thousand cuts. 

The request from Bollinger Algiers, a subsidiary of shipbuilding and vessel repair firm Bollinger Shipyards, did not meet two of the district’s four requirements to secure an exemption, according to the notes in a board resolution to deny the exemption.

It’s unclear what project or Bollinger property the exemption would apply to. The company did not return a phone call, and school district officials did not immediately respond to a question from The Lens.

The industrial tax exemption is the state’s most expensive tax break, costing local governments $13.7 billion in lost tax revenue between 2006 and 2016, according to The Advocate.

The exemption has allowed eligible manufacturers to forgo all property taxes related to new facility improvements for up to 10 years. That was recently capped at 80 percent of property taxes for 10 years, but because Bollinger applied for the exemption before the rules changed, it is seeking a 100 percent exemption, emails from the company show.

It's still possible that the board could deny this one.  But, really, they ought to be in the habit of denying these and just taking all the money they're entitled to. Instead, they're very likely to follow the lead of the mayor's office since they've weighed in.

At the July meeting, Kleban said the school board’s criteria were adopted after consulting with Cantrell’s office. But on Tuesday, Cantrell spokesman Beau Tidwell said the city “is still in the process of developing a procedure for reviewing ITEP requests,” which will be done in collaboration with the school board and the sheriff’s sffice.

Bollinger has also submitted requests with the city and the sheriff’s office for exemptions on property taxes they oversee.

“Until the new process is in place, we believe it’s fair that requests such as Bollinger Algiers’ request — which was submitted under the old system — should be allowed to move forward,” Tidwell said.

During last year's mayoral election Boysie Bollinger donated heavily to a PAC attacking Cantrell's opponent as having been "for sale" to special interests.  It's taken several months to finish this "review" process. Maybe because of complicating factors like that.

They need to hear from the mayor

OPSB put off a decision on that Industrial Tax Exemption we were just talking about.  I wanted to highlight one quote in particular.

Board member Ben Kleban, who proposed the resolution, moved to defer it because the school board hasn’t gotten buy-in from the city.

“We need to hear the voice of our new mayor on this issue, because it does cross multiple government entities,” Kleban said.

It is common to rebuke anyone who tries to bring up education policy during the mayor/council election cycle with a dismissive, "But they don't have anything to do with the schools!" type comment. Obviously, that isn't true in practice since we're in the bizarre position of having to weigh school funding against "economic development."

One issue that hasn't been discussed yet is the way certain of the local charter operators depend on donations from companies who benefit from the tax exemption. In other words, a select community of privileged business owners gets to choose which schools benefit from their contributions. Inequality is baked into the charter system in a myriad of ways. This is one the school board has the power to undo.  It's something they're going to study.. "aggressively" now.

Thursday, the board approved a substitute resolution that creates a working group to develop a long-term strategy for the program.

The group must present its recommendations by October, which Kleban praised as an “aggressive timeline.”

He said he was optimistic that the group could come up with a plan that could do more than a one-time allocation.

“Though this isn’t the same as my original proposal,” he said, “it has the potential to be even bigger.”

Waiting on the mayor now, I guess. 

Only took two years to get started with this

We've been hearing a lot lately about the negative effects of state level preemption over municipal governing policies. In Louisiana, the state legislature has interfered with the ability of local governments (New Orleans in particular) to establish their own laws regarding all sorts of things including gun control, minimum wage, even zoning regulations.    It's a fundamentally anti-democratic practice and a never ending source of frustration for local elected persons who find themselves effectively blocked from carrying out the will of the people they represent in many cases.

Given the growing controversy over this practice, it is strange that certain local authorities have been slow to take advantage of an opportunity to bypass one of its most damaging manifestations.  In 2016, the Governor signed an executive order that grants local taxing authorities a greater degree of control over the Industrial Tax Exemption. 

The most significant change in the executive order may be that approval of the tax exemption now requires a resolution of support from local taxing agencies. Also, the order shortens the maximum length of an exemption from 10 years to eight years, and in the final three years, the property tax exemption will be capped at 80 percent rather than 100 percent. Those changes should trim the program's costs by at least 25 percent.

There are complications but, basically, what this means is local school boards and sheriff's departments who have been especially crippled by this massive corporate giveaway now have the power to reject or rescind it.  It wasn't until February of this year, however, that anyone actually exercised this new power. Caddo Parish Sheriff Steve Prator denied an applicant a small exemption  worth $6000 over 8 years. That seems insignificant but it sets a precedent which hasn't gone unnoticed.

Last month, teachers in Baton Rouge began agitating the local government to tighten its leash on the tax exemption.   And this week, the Orleans Parish School Board introduced a resolution by Ben Kleban to impose a three year moratorium on granting the exemption. According to Kleban, here is how the Industrial Tax Exemption affects Orleans Parish schools.

According to Kleban's resolution, the "intent of the Industrial Tax Exemption program is to create jobs and stimulate the economy, recipient companies of industrial tax exemptions in Orleans Parish promised to create over 4,500 jobs since 2000, but the actual change in jobs was a net decline of 76 jobs."

The school system's tax exemptions in 2017 totaled $3 million, which could have been used for education programs, Kleban said Tuesday during the board's finance committee meeting.

Even if we accept the premise that there's ever a justification for diverting tax dollars intended for education over to private sector "job creation," this program fails according to its own metric. The bigger picture is even worse than what Kleban's numbers describe.  In December, Together Louisiana presented findings to the City Council about where that money goes.  All in all they found that the exemptions up for renewal this year had delivered a total loss of 279 jobs. Also there's a breakdown.

Here are  the top six incentive recipients in Orleans Parish, the subsidies they received and the jobs they created as a result of the incentive, according to Together Louisiana.

• Folger Coffee Co., $105.5 million in subsidies, 121 net jobs created
• Brookfield District Energy USA, $17.2 million in subsidies, 14 net jobs created
• Air Products and Chemicals Inc., $16.7 million in subsidies, 24 fewer jobs after the tax break was approved
• Southern Recycling LLC, $15.6 million, 80 net jobs created
• Entergy New Orleans, $13.9 million in subsidies, nine fewer jobs
• Textron Marine & Land Systems, $9.6 million in subsidies, 51 net jobs created

All of which costs the city $10.6 million altogether and the school board, as stated, $3 million.

So Kleban's moratorium seems like a no-brainer, right?  Well the school board isn't so sure just yet. They're gonna wait for the Business Alliance to tell them what to do.

A representative for the New Orleans Business Alliance asked the School Board to defer voting on the measure and to give the group an opportunity to present findings to the group.

The committee chose to forward the resolution to the full board for consideration without a recommendation.

Update: I should have known there would have been a more detailed story about all of this at The Lens.  The full school board is expected to vote on the tax exemption today. 

Low barrier

This week, the mayor announced plans for a new "low-barrier" homeless shelter on Erato street at S. Derbigny just uptown from the Calliope overpass. The shelter is a good idea and deserves to be supported. Not everybody thinks so, of course.

The new shelter, which Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s administration plans to build at 3101 Erato St. in the B.W. Cooper neighborhood, is just two blocks away from two public school buildings. They are Sylvanie Williams College Prep and the shuttered Booker T. Washington High School, which is expected to reopen in the near future.

Critics worry that piling many of the city’s homeless in one space could pose a threat to students and residents because the shelter would be open to all comers, including people who are mentally ill or struggling with alcohol and drug addictions.

“What we are saying is: Our children are a top priority,” said Ben Kleban, an Orleans Parish School Board member-elect and the founder of the charter management group that runs Williams. “Safety for them is a top priority. And this shelter, by design, will concentrate some of the most in need … in a neighborhood that is already in need of services.”

"Think of the children!" says Ben Kleban even though there is no reason to believe any children would be harmed by there being better services available for the homeless population.  Kleban, by the way, is an OPSB "member-elect" as a consequence of having been unopposed in one of what could have been a pivotal slate of school board races.   Yet another reason these elections matter. The barriers for entry to these offices shouldn't be quite so low.

"Unambiguous success"

Interesting word choice as Uptownmessenger lays out Ben Kleban's resume here. Kleban, who is the founder of New Orleans College Prep charter network, qualified to run for Orleans Parsish School Board this week.

New Orleans College Prep received the charter for Sylvanie Williams Elementary School in 2009, followed by Walter L. Cohen High School in 2011 and then Lawrence Crocker Elementary in 2012, and now is expecting a total of more than 1,500 students this year across its Uptown campuses. Cohen has been the network’s most unambiguous success, rising from one of the lowest-rated failing schools in the city to a B school performance score last year and boasting a 100-percent college-acceptance rate for graduates three years in a row.

The article doesn't mention that just a couple years ago the "unambiguous success" was the site of a student protest against the controversial firings of teachers and staff during the transition to College Prep's management. Maybe that alone doesn't throw a whole lot of ambiguity into Cohen's performance score. But it is a sign that such metrics may not provide us with the only gauge on a school's "success." This was the topic of Andre Perry's address to the Rising Tide conference a few short years back.

Standardized test scores may be rising in the city’s public schools, but those gains on paper do not translate into any meaningful improvements in the lives of the city’s poorest students, said former New Orleans education official and activist Dr. Andre Perry. Challenging school reformers’ beliefs that a wholesale restructuring of the education system will create a better society, Perry added that all social conditions that plague New Orleans’ poor and African-American neighborhoods still persist even after 10 years of school reforms.

The best first step the city can take to real improvements for the African-American community, Perry said, is to begin searching for a way to reconcile with the thousands of teachers who were wrongfully fired after Hurricane Katrina.

This fall's OPSB election is important. It happens just as the local school board prepares to accept control over the vast majority of the system back from the state run RSD. Here's who has qualified so far.  There are a lot of administrative voices in there. It would be nice to see more candidates who represent teachers and parents get involved too.