ALBANY (AP) -- In the Albany City School District this spring, a glossy mailer declared "Albany School Taxes are Too Damn High" in drumming up "no" votes for the local school budget on May 17.

At the same time statewide, letter-writing campaigns targeted neighbors and local newspaper editorial pages, phone banks called voters, rows of lawn signs lined the streets and "push poll" phone calls distorted views for or against local school budgets.

The efforts to influence millions of taxpayers' dollars by advocates of public charter schools, teachers unions, anti-tax groups, tea party activists, local Republican and Democratic committees and others are compelling, effective, and largely unregulated.

"The public deserves to know who is influencing their vote on school budgets," said state Assemblyman Sam Hoyt, a Buffalo Democrat, in co-sponsoring a bill now moving through the Legislature.

The bill would govern spending in the state's more than 700 school districts outside New York City, Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester and Yonkers where residents vote on budgets. Hoyt said New York's proposed 2-percent cap on the growth of local property taxes will likely make lobbying on school budgets more intense beginning next year, and make the need for disclosure more important.

"This bill should have been introduced many years before this," said Sen. Kenneth LaValle, a Suffolk County Republican. "We're all about transparency, all about disclosure. This should be a very easy bill for people to understand, to digest, and pass."

The bill sponsored by LaValle and Hoyt would require any group spending $1,000 or more to influence a school vote to publicly disclose who they are and how they spent the money. It would end anonymous brickbats often launched just days before a budget vote to mobilize a group for or against the budget and its impact on programs, faculty and property taxes.

The annual efforts each spring before local school budget votes can average $800,000, with the New York State United Teachers union alone topping $1 million in some years. But charter school advocates and tax opponents also contribute to the "super Tuesday" votes in May each year, sometimes anonymously, with no accountability.

A key to the bill will be the view of NYSUT, the powerful union that returns millions of dollars to its locals statewide each year. Those funds can be used to influence voters on a school budget. The money is 20 percent of voluntary donations from its more than 600,000 members to NYSUT's political action committee. NYSUT also funds annual school budget vote campaigns that usually include TV and radio blitzes. That statewide spending is already reported in detail.

"I think transparency is always a good thing and I would expect that the legislation should require the same transparency of all groups," said Richard Iannuzzi, president of NYSUT. The union isn't supporting or rejecting the bill, but instead has questions about it that might put off a vote until after the 2011 legislative session, scheduled to end June 20.

NYSUT's local unions typically receive $7 million to $8 million in total each year for the local action. Most districts spend $1,500 to $2,500. Any spikes in that spending in specific districts and the spending by groups on the other side of the issue would be contained in the new reporting system.

"With the tax cap, there is, I think, a very real likelihood we're going to see a dramatic increase in campaign activity surrounding budget votes," Hoyt said.

NYSUT said that if the tax cap was in effect in the May votes, about a third of school budgets would have been defeated.

(Copyright ©2011 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)