Labrie: Behind Your Property Tax Bill: Where The Money Really Goes

By Brian Labrie, NH Journal

If you’ve opened a local property tax bill recently, you already know the routine.

Take a deep breath, sit down, and brace yourself. Across New Hampshire, local property tax rates continue to climb. Fixed-income seniors are being squeezed out of homes they’ve owned for decades, and young families looking at local real estate feel priced out of their own communities. Every year, when local school district budgets expand, taxpayers hear the same emotional appeal: “It’s for the kids.”

As a small-business owner who has operated in New Hampshire for more than 30 years, I know investing in the future is essential. In the private sector, when operational needs shift or economic pressures build, businesses adjust overhead to keep core operations viable. It’s a tough reality, but if a company doesn’t adapt, it fails.

In public education, however, central administrators and labor organizations rarely make those same proactive adjustments. Instead, the default solution is almost always to ask property owners to write larger checks.

Across our state, classroom enrollment has declined over time, yet SAU budgets routinely expand at rates far exceeding overall inflation. So why are classroom teachers still reaching into their own pockets to buy daily supplies while taxpayers foot the bill for record per-student expenditures?

Where is the money actually going?

The answer often lies in the central bureaucracy, better known as School Administrative Units. Over the past decade, administrative structures across New Hampshire have expanded quietly. Even when student enrollment levels off or declines, central office spending continues its upward trajectory. We see a proliferation of assistant directors, specialized coordinators, administrative consultants, and layered management hierarchies.

Meanwhile, local property taxpayers shoulder the burden. Adding to the frustration, taxpayers also fund the administrative infrastructure that collects and processes union dues. These operational line items are buried deep within complex budget documents. By the time local voters see them, they are often presented with an unfair choice: Approve a multimillion-dollar overall package or be accused of failing to support education.

That isn’t a fair choice for taxpayers, and it’s certainly not fair to our front-line educators. Every dollar swallowed up by SAU bureaucracy and administrative expansion is a dollar that doesn’t reach classroom instruction or competitive teacher compensation.

In the private sector, any organization that allocated revenue to additional management layers while underfunding front-line operations would quickly face financial restructuring. Yet in local public governance, administrative overhead has too often become an untouchable line item. Genuine fiscal responsibility isn’t about cutting the quality of education; it’s about ensuring taxpayer dollars reach the room where teaching actually happens.

Thankfully, Granite Staters now have a clear, democratic mechanism to establish accountability. Under recently passed House Bill 1300, voters will have the opportunity to place local school district tax caps directly on high-turnout general election ballots in November 2026 and 2028.

By voting to establish a local school tax cap, voters trigger a targeted statutory cap of 6% on the growth of SAU central office administrative spending. This places fiscal boundaries directly in the hands of the entire electorate on a major Election Day rather than relying solely on the handful of voters who attend late-winter deliberative sessions.

Families and seniors on fixed incomes cannot absorb double-digit budget growth year after year. Small-business owners cannot absorb endless property tax increases without being forced to pass those costs on to local consumers.

We can support high-quality public schools and demand structural financial discipline at the same time. By using the ballot box to implement a local tax cap, we can put a firm check on central administrative overhead, increase transparency around SAU spending and ensure resources are prioritized for classroom instruction.

It’s time to focus our education funding on students and teachers, not bureaucracy. Let’s use the tools HB 1300 provides to bring balance back to our local budgets and offer long-overdue property tax relief to New Hampshire homeowners. Responsible, dynamic staffing would be a welcome sight for weary property taxpayers right about now.

Rep. Brian Labrie represents Bedford in the New Hampshire House. He owns multiple small businesses, which together employ more than 40 New Hampshire residents. He wrote this for NHJournal.com.

This story was originally published by the NH Journal, an online news publication dedicated to providing fair, unbiased reporting on, and analysis of, political news of interest to New Hampshire. For more stories from the NH Journal, visit NHJournal.com.