[F]or the second day in a row, the House could not agree on the best way to address concerns raised by school board members, superintendents and taxpayers over the spending thresholds in Act 46.
The Senate, on the other hand, decisively voted a final time to repeal the controversial caps. The Senate bill, S.233, will be taken up by the House Committee on Education Thursday.
The question remains how to find compromise between absolute repeal and slight adjustments to keep the cost containment mechanism in the law.
“I think that finding consensus will be difficult, but I am a perpetually optimistic person,” said Speaker of the House Shap Smith.
Smith said the House had built support for the proposal to add 0.9 percent to each school district’s allowable growth rate to help cover unexpected increases in health care premiums. But when it was discovered that the Agency of Education had distributed per pupil threshold numbers to school districts that didn’t include exclusions and that wasn’t the intent of lawmakers when they passed Act 46, people were “spooked” and began to waver, according to Smith.
“There probably still is a plurality that will support it [0.9 point percent increase],” the speaker said. “There is always the possibility for consensus. There is also a very real possibility we might not be able to and if we don’t find consensus then we will have to live with the law as it is written.”
On Tuesday morning, Rep. David Sharpe, chair of the House Committee on Education, offered H.566 – legislation that would give schools more spending leeway, on the floor. It was sent to his committee along with a set of amendments offered by House members that could alter H.566. On Wednesday, members of the House ed panel slogged through those amendments voting on one after the other, knowing that the Senate’s repeal was barreling toward them.
“I’d like to have a House position, a consensus that can be used to negotiate against” with the Senate, Sharpe said. “We have to come together in this committee and on the floor.”
Then the sausage making began in earnest. The panel began to carefully craft a measure starting with a unanimous vote in favor of an amendment from Rep. Paul Dame, R-Essex Junction, that would instruct the Agency of Education to apply whichever per pupil threshold number most benefitted each school district. So, if exemptions help a district stay under their allowable growth percentage, then they would be applied; and if removing exclusions works best for districts, that is the one that will be used.
They also voted 8-2-1 in favor of giving Pomfret and Bridgewater an exemption from the allowable growth percentage threshold. The school just completed a merger and cut costs significantly yet they were going to be penalized because they were over their proscribed spending limit.
Rep. Scott Beck, R-St. Johnsbury, voted no because he thought the exception was unfair. “If we open this up to this district what are we going to say to other districts that have been spending very small amounts of money for a long time? I’m just very concerned how those other low spending districts that find themselves in the same threshold situation are going to view that.”
That didn’t stop Rep. Kurt Wright, R-Burlington, from throwing his support behind the measure. “I respect the argument on both sides. I’m going to vote for this. It is a unique situation. I would have supported some kind of exemption process anyway.”
Under Act 46, any district that spends more than the allowable growth percentage has to pay a dollar for dollar penalty for each additional dollar spent above the threshold. Rep. Patti Komline R-Dorset, offered an amendment that would reduce the fine to 50 cents on the dollar. The panel then voted 7-3-1 and added it to H.566.
At that point, Sharpe’s plan was to draft an omnibus amendment that would incorporate all the amendments the committee approved. The amendment would increase the allowable growth percentage by 0.9 percent for every school district, instruct the Agency of Education to use whichever per pupil spending threshold best served a school district when calculating spending, lower the penalty for school districts that exceed AGP to 50 cents on each additional dollar and exempt Bridgewater and Pomfret from AGP for FY 17.
“It reflects the work we’ve been doing the last couple of days and then we can vote as to whether to amend the Senate bill [S.233] with our proposal,” Sharpe said.
But then, in the afternoon, the morning’s work began to unravel. The harbinger was final passage of the repeal bill in the Senate. Sen. Dustin Degree, R-Franklin, who voted no, wanted to keep the original caps in place. “Voters were clear in 2014 that at the top of their list of things for us to do was to slow the growth of education spending immediately and repealing does the exact opposite,” Degree said.
Not long after, Degree’s compatriots in the House sent a similar message. House Minority Leader Don Turner, R-Milton, held a press conference flanked by more than a dozen GOP members, including two from the House ed panel, and declared that they would not support any changes to the allowable growth percentage. “I haven’t heard from any of my constituent-taxpayers asking me to raise their property taxes,” Turner said. “These are the people that write my paycheck.”
A number of speakers began by saying that their districts were able to meet the thresholds. Turner said that those school districts that complied with the law should be praised instead of penalized by letting others off the hook and hiking up spending. “Repeals or increases [0.9 percent] will increase education spending and increase your property taxes.”
Rep. Janssen Willhoit, R-St. Johnsbury, whose amendment to reduce the credit available for income sensitivity from $8,000 to $6,000 was tabled by the House ed panel to be taken up later in the session when they address the education finance system, said he would bring his amendment to the floor of the House. “The whole point behind this bill [Act 46] was to control spending. I will never support an increase in taxes,” he said.
Tomorrow morning the House ed panel will have to deal with the Senate’s repeal legislation. It isn’t clear that they will move forward with their original plan. “Everything is in flux,” said Smith.
Smith recommends that school board members in the final throes of the budgeting process proceed as if nothing will change. “School boards should assume that the current allowable growth thresholds are going to stay in place,” he said.