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Publication Date: May 14th, 2026

It seems that the Hudson Teachers’ Association has the money and votes in the bag. Is this election, and its rules, stacked against taxpayers?

(Audio Clip & HCSD FOIL, Budget Overview)

Image creatively remixed from The Economist Magazine.

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The Briefing Box:

• The Hudson Teachers’ Association and NYSUT are running a professional phone bank, mailer operation, and youth coalition campaign to pass a budget that serves adults, not children.
• The school vote is held on an off-cycle Tuesday in May by design: usually less than ~10% of registered voters decide half the property tax bill, because the budget cannot survive a November electorate.
• If the budget fails once, New York law requires taxpayers to defeat it a second time: weeks later, against an opponent that is now more organized and in an even quieter election.
• The Board of Education that negotiates the union's salary is elected by the same electorate the union is best positioned to mobilize, meaning the union effectively picks its own boss.
• Hudson spends among the highest per-pupil dollars in New York State and delivers some of the worst academic outcomes, and the only lever residents have left is a no vote on May 19th. </aside>

Hudson City School District (HCSD) will spend $16.96m next year on adult fringe benefits and $11.48m on classroom instruction. The line that funds the retirement of adults who already received a Hudson education is 1.48 times the line that funds the children currently receiving one. This is not an education budget with a benefits cost attached, but rather a benefits budget with a school attached. Everything that follows is the Hudson Teachers’ Association (HTA) and its parent New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) protecting it from you on Tuesday, May 19.

Actual Audio. A volunteer from the Hudson teachers' union, scripted, polite, well-trained, calling a random Hudson household this week to remind the resident to vote yes on the budget and the slate. NYSUT runs the same operation in every district in New York.

Actual Audio. A volunteer from the Hudson teachers' union, scripted, polite, well-trained, calling a random Hudson household this week to remind the resident to vote yes on the budget and the slate. NYSUT runs the same operation in every district in New York.

Shorter and image driven version of this article on Instagram.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DYUwzhwgjsC/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Three “Hustles” Make The System Work:

The Calendar Is The First Hustle.

Hudson's school vote falls on the third Tuesday in May, fixed by Education Law § 2022. Turnout collapses by design. Sarah Anzia at Berkeley, in Timing and Turnout: How Off-Cycle Elections Favor Organized Groups (University of Chicago Press, 2014), found across thousands of districts that off-cycle elections deliver the result to whichever group fills the gap. The union has the apparatus. The taxpayer has a job. 11% of registered voters decide what half of the property tax bill funds. Call this what it is. Cowardice. The vote is held in May because it cannot survive November.

Even Jacob Soboroff, the MSNBC correspondent whose Why Tuesday? nonprofit built the left's case that Tuesday voting suppresses turnout by design, made the argument the teachers' unions now suppress.