The reimbursement plan is designed to provide more relief to districts with high taxes and low ability to pay than to districts with low taxes and high ability to pay.
Only those who applied will be eligible for relief, but don't expect a check. Your school district will get a check and they are to deduct your allocation from your bill. In short, you most likely won't see a decrease, but more probably a lesser increase or break even in year one.
So what do qualified residents in various districts get (used Northampton and Lehigh counties)?
- East Penn (Emmaus), Parkland, and Southern Lehigh receive the least at $118, $117, and $113.
- Allentown is the highest at $537 followed by Bangor at $294.
- Nazareth is at $218.
This tells me that counter to the popular belief that Nazareth is a wealthy district, it is in fact on the cusp of the bottom third based on the state calculation. The primary reason is the high portion of residential to business properties, coupled with the fact that we have three boroughs that include a relatively high lower income (including high senior/fixed income) population.
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So, went to the PA Dept. of Ed site and went through the documents.
If you crunch the numbers, it is clear that this administration is taking care of its home town and the rest of the state is getting very little benefit.
If I read correctly, out of a pool of $612,899,999.87, the city of Philadelphia is getting $86,544,851.15 ($55,878,216.81 for the Philly SD, $30,666,634.34 to offset the suburban wage tax), or, about 14% of the total available.
Nazareth is getting $1,589,213.73, or about .25% of the total pie.
Even the city of Pittsburg (at $15M) is getting the short end of the stick.
So, while property owners in Philly get a nice tax break (notice they don't include the amount of their rebate), the rest of us get crumbs.
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