If I could show you how to provide property tax relief to the vast majority of New Hampshire homeowners — while ensuring that no homeowner is forced out of their home by burdensome property taxes — without a broad-based sales or income tax, would I get your attention?
If yes, I have a plan.
Right now, the debate over education funding is heading in the wrong direction. Instead of solving the problem, recent legislation attempts to redefine the state’s responsibility rather than addressing the inequities that families and communities experience daily.
We don’t have a low spending problem. We rank among the highest in America in per-pupil spending. What we have is a fairness problem.
We rely more heavily on local property taxes to fund education than almost any other state. The result is predictable. In some towns, property taxes are manageable. In others, they are crushing.
Right now, we have a system that places disproportionate burdens on some communities and homeowners while absolving other communities from having to share the burden of high property taxes thus causing communities that can’t afford it to pay more.
House Bill 1815 does not solve that problem. It makes it worse.
By downshifting more responsibility to local communities, it deepens the divide between property-wealthy towns and those with fewer resources.
There is a better way forward, and importantly, it does not require a broad-based sales or income tax.
The solution begins with the principle: no homeowner should be forced out of their home because of property taxes.
For many Granite Staters — particularly seniors on fixed incomes and working families whose wages have not kept pace with rising assessments — that fear is very real. People who have worked hard, paid their mortgages and contributed to their communities for decades increasingly find themselves trapped by a system that takes little account of their actual ability to pay.
That is why New Hampshire should adopt an income-based property tax circuit breaker as a part of its solution. With a circuit breaker, no homeowner would pay more than a fixed percentage of household income in property taxes. If taxes exceeded that threshold, the state and community would step in to make up the difference.
But tax relief alone is not enough. We must also fix how we distribute education funding.
Right now, our system relies too heavily on property value as a proxy for a community’s ability to fund education. But property value alone does not tell the whole story. It ignores income levels, and the actual capacity of communities to raise revenue without overburdening residents.
Every other major category of taxing and spending is directed based on need and impact. Education funding should be no different.
We should be asking where are students with the greatest needs, where are taxpayers least able to carry the burden and will each dollar make the greatest difference?
That means modernizing New Hampshire’s education funding formula so that it accounts for both student need and community capacity — not just property value.
In the Claremont decisions, the Supreme Court wrote:
“We hold that part II, article 83 imposes a duty on the State to provide a constitutionally adequate education to every educable child in the public schools in New Hampshire and to guarantee adequate funding.”
The Court identified two obligations to provide a constitutionally adequate education and guarantee adequate funding.
Those obligations are related, but not necessarily identical.
“Provide” means creating, maintaining and overseeing a system that works fairly for all students and taxpayers. It is a system’s responsibility, not a single-mechanism mandate to pay for.
The state already provides in many ways. It provides infrastructure through policy and investment. It provides economic opportunity through tax and regulatory frameworks and natural resources.
Education should be viewed the same way.
The state’s obligation is to create a fair and functional system — one that aligns resources with need, protects taxpayers from unreasonable burdens and ensures that every child has access to opportunity regardless of where they live.
That is what “provide” should mean.
First, this approach protects homeowners from being taxed out of their homes. Second, it ensures that state funding actually goes where it is needed most. Third, it preserves local control while reducing the extreme disparities that have fueled decades of litigation and frustration.
And it does all of this without requiring a broad-based sales or income tax.
That matters because any lasting solution must fit New Hampshire’s culture and values including fairness, local control, independence and fiscal restraint. We do not need to become Massachusetts or Vermont in order to create a better system.
We can redefine “adequate” and hope the problem goes away. Or we can confront the reality that our system places too much burden on too many homeowners and limits opportunity for too many students — and fix both how we raise money and distribute it.
If the goal is to reduce property taxes, protect homeowners and meet our constitutional obligations to students without creating new broad-based taxes, then I have a solution.
But, I’m not a state representative. I have no state position. What I do have is experience. I’m a former State Board of Education Chair, I have argued education funding before the New Hampshire Supreme Court, and I won the Josiah Bartlett Better Government Award on education funding. I have a new plan. Who’s willing to listen?
Fred Bramante is a past chairman of the NH State Board of Education and a former candidate for governor. He lives in Durham.