However, the governor Thursday would not go as far as calling for a blanket rejection of all budgets next week to send lawmakers a message.
In 2014, Gov. Peter Shumlin told voters to “carefully scrutinize” any increases and called school boards on the carpet for not doing enough to rein in spending before town meeting. Many school board members blamed Shumlin’s comments for the defeat of 34 school budgets, a significantly higher number than typical.
Scott said residents should vote no if, for example, a community raises school expenses but has fewer students. He said he had not done enough research to know how he would vote on the school budget in Berlin, his hometown.
“I just advocate for them to get out to vote. I’m not going to ask them to vote them down. I don’t think that’s my job,” Scott said at a news conference. “You wouldn’t have it consistently throughout Vermont.”
However, a few minutes later the governor said that in communities where spending is going up and student populations are declining, voters should “do the math” and reject those budgets.
As part of a larger education overhaul presented in January, the governor called on communities to level fund their school budgets for next year at the same amount as this year. He asked them to put off their school budget votes until May to allow time to rewrite them, but lawmakers voted against that idea.
Scott decried the low turnout at Town Meeting Day last year of approximately 13 percent, saying that figure was too low to show that approval of school budgets indicated residents supported paying higher property taxes.
He encouraged Vermonters to “get involved and pay attention and see the vision I do” of holding the line on spending “or prove me wrong” by having high turnouts, more than 50 percent, approve the school budgets. Scott criticized Act 60, the state’s education funding law, as creating too much of an increase in spending.
Scott said it wouldn’t make sense to issue a statewide call for residents to reject school budgets, because voters in some communities would abide by that and others might not. That would result in a disparity, he said, unlike his proposal, where all communities were called on to forgo increases.
Vermont spends about $1.6 billion on kindergarten through 12th grade for approximately 88,000 students and has one of the highest per-pupil costs and lowest student-to-teacher ratios in the country. Scott made affordability and holding the line on property taxes a signature issue in his campaign.
The state has projected school spending will increase about 2.2 percent next year. Scott said some savings might come from lower-than-expected health care costs.
The governor has vowed to hold the line on taxes, including property taxes, and has said he will veto the state budget if necessary to achieve those results.
His education proposal in January called on using projected savings in K-12 spending to raise funding for early childhood and higher education programs.
“We certainly don’t want to increase property taxes, so we’ll look at any way we can to keep that from happening,” Scott said last week.
At the news conference, Scott said he would veto a proposal by a House committee that called for raising various taxes, including the rooms and meals tax, and later leveling a per-parcel fee, to clean up Lake Champlain.
