Wealthy N.H. communities can keep their share of statewide education property tax revenues, top court rules
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New Hampshire Attorney General John M. Formella said his team is pleased with the court's decision, which he said reaffirms the Legislature's constitutional authority to spend tax revenues on the public's behalf.
Without an income tax or broad-based sales tax, New Hampshire relies more heavily
Under the SWEPT system, which was established
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As a result, some cities and towns — such as Portsmouth, Moultonborough, and Waterville Valley — raise significantly more in SWEPT revenues than they need to fund an adequate education for their local students, while other municipalities must supplement their local SWEPT revenues with additional property taxes.
Rockingham County Superior Court Judge David Ruoff
'The plaintiffs do not dispute that under the SWEPT, as administered, taxpayers are actually assessed at a uniform rate,' Chief Justice Gordon J. MacDonald wrote for the majority. 'That concludes the constitutional inquiry.'
In his dissent, however, Senior Associate Justice
'To be sure, I agree with the majority that the SWEPT rate is facially uniform and that the SWEPT is assessed and collected from the taxpayers in full. But, as in our earlier school funding cases, that does not end the inquiry,' he wrote.
'The majority looks past the fundamental economic reality that money is fungible, and that when communities retain excess SWEPT revenue, the local education tax rate is reduced — and the overall property tax burden for the taxpayers in those communities is likewise reduced,' he added.
Jason Sorens, a senior research fellow with the
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'Property values in high-capacity towns already reflect any advantages accruing to them from the ability to retain excess SWEPT funds,' he wrote
Tuesday's ruling also addressed a separate but related question about how the state should handle SWEPT in unincorporated places. Ruoff had ruled the state's practice of setting a negative local education tax rate for those areas was unconstitutional, and all four Supreme Court justices agreed.
The ruling didn't address another big-ticket dispute over public school funding in New Hampshire. In a separate case, Ruoff said in 2023 that state-level funding was so low that it violated a state constitutional obligation to provide for an 'adequate' education. He ruled the state would need to increase its education funding by
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