Editor’s note: This commentary is by Rep. Sam Young, of Glover, who represents the Orleans-Caledonia District in the Vermont House of Representatives.
[P]eople must be wondering what the Legislature is still doing in session, and every beautiful day in late May and early June that I drive to Montpelier I ask myself the very same question.
It seems easy enough: all the Democrats in the Legislature have to do is agree that we won’t increase tax rates and we can all go home. Wait … there’s a catch; we also have to approve a series of unvetted proposals that lack serious and necessary detail, which were introduced by the governor’s office in the second to last week of the legislative session (for the second year in a row). These policy changes that are demanded as part of the package will have long-lasting and potentially devastating impacts on our rural schools.
Let’s go back to the beginning. In December, the tax department issued its projections that property tax rates would need to go up by 9 cents to cover the costs of this year’s school budgets. The governor had sent a letter to all school boards in the state asking them to keep their spending below a 2.5 percent increase. When all the school budgets were in and passed, school boards around the state had done even better than the governor had asked, and had kept overall school spending to a mere 1.8 percent increase. This reduced the property tax rate increase to roughly 6 cents. So following town meeting, as a way of repaying school boards for their arduous and thankless work, the governor demanded that we find another $40 million to save within the education fund. With school budgets passed, this becomes a nearly impossible task without overturning the fundamental democratic will of our own communities.
On my committee, Ways and Means, we spent the first two months of the legislative session working on an overhaul of the entire education funding formula. We tried to move funding education more toward reliance on income tax and less on property taxes. The House proposal would have provided a property tax decrease of 10 percent or roughly 15 cents statewide. However, without any real partnership from the administration, the effort faltered.
Meanwhile the Education Committee did an immense amount of work on the funding of special education, and created a policy that will hopefully better serve our students with special needs and reduce costs over time. It was passed unanimously out of the House.
We did good work and it was done with much bipartisan support. Characteristic of that bipartisan work, the budget passed the Appropriations Committee 11-0 with the full support of both Democrats and Republicans on the committee, for the second year in a row. The final version passed the House 117-14 with tripartisan support. This is the budget – the budget with tripartisan support — that the governor vetoed.
The governor’s final proposal to solve the school funding dilemma would use $55 million in one-time money (revenue that will only be collected for one year) to make up for the increase in this year’s school budgets. The problem with this approach, using one-time money for ongoing expenses, is that it will make next year’s hole bigger and the tax rate increase will be even larger and scarier. Following the governor’s recommendation will leave the education fund $46 million in the hole next year, even before schools spend another penny.
Then there’s the catch: The governor’s proposal includes a “task force” to reduce teacher-to-student ratios. This task force has no real way to actually reduce ratios, but magically accounts for hundreds of millions of dollars of his projected “savings.” It also includes a proposal to reduce the excess spending threshold from 121 percent to 110 percent, which would be devastating to rural schools that do not have the larger student base of our more urban neighbors. This would dramatically increase property tax rates for us in the long run. For those who think the Act 46 mergers are an attack on local control, unfortunately that is just child’s play compared to these proposals, which the administration is trying to ram through the Legislature using a government shutdown as leverage.
According to our nonpartisan fiscal staff, the Joint Fiscal Office, there were serious errors in the administration’s math. This included (but was in no way limited to) double counting of special education savings. All in all they said the governor’s numbers were off by $100 million to $160 million. Instead of checking their math and handing in a revised proposal, the governor’s chief of staff has started attacking our fiscal analysts. This is raw politics, not sound fiscal policy.
Lastly, holding tax rates level does not mean that your property taxes will be the same this year. Tax rates are just one variable in an equation. Your taxes will be a calculation based on the value of your home, your town’s CLA (Common Level of Appraisal), the education spending of your school district, and most likely your income as well. Saying that tax rates won’t go up is a good sound bite, I’ll give the governor that much, but for another year we have failed to get to the heart of what are actually real problems in the education funding formula.
So, these are the thoughts that I’m having as I’m driving back and forth to Montpelier on beautiful June days. While I wish I were at home attending to all the summer projects that need to get done, it is important that the Legislature fulfill its constitutional duty to provide a check on the power of the executive. Maybe next year the governor could provide the details of large scale reforms to the education system at the beginning of the legislative session, and not hold us all hostage to these proposals that seem half-baked at best.
