The role of nonresidential wealth and school finance: A descriptive analysis of regional nonresidential wealth and tax effort in New York state

The purpose of this researcher was to differentiate the nonresidential tax effort and residential tax effort with a regional frame in NYS public school financing. Schein's (1985) conceptual model of organizational culture as themes, patterns, and quantitative discrepancies was incorporated. Audited 2002 data from ORPS, NYSED, DTF and the NYS Comptroller were analyzed. Tax effort was redefined using nonresidential levy, residential tax effort without STAR, adequacy and tax capacity for possible alternatives for inter-regional or intra-regional redistribution.;Exiguous local tax effort in high need school districts (NYSED) and where tax effort had been exported across boundaries were corroborated graphically using Mapinfo©. Regional parity of wealth distribution was elucidated and grounded upon the notion of tax capacity, the taxable full value per pupil, and the adjusted gross income per pupil. Of the ten geographic boundaries set by DTF tax parameters only New York City (.36%) and Central New York (.48%) were the two regions that needed to raise tax effort to achieve goals defined as adequacy. Their tax efforts would have been attained using the tax capacities of intra-regional nonresidential taxable assessed values of the underlying tax base.