By Rich Kronberg
I have spoken to many people who are torn about how to vote on Prop 204, and I can understand how they feel. They don’t like the idea of increasing the most regressive of all taxes…the sales tax. At the same time they are unhappy that the Arizona legislature has, at best, flat funded education funding even as it was getting hundreds of millions of dollars from the temporary sales tax voted in with Prop 100 a few years ago.
I am voting against Prop 204 for two fundamental reasons. This proposition does nothing to ensure that money raised by the sales tax will find its way into classrooms and it is bad public policy. For those of you who live in TUSD, you can look at the district’s spending patterns and see that about half of it will wind up in classrooms and a good part of the rest will be spent on items that have the same educational value as a hangnail. Those of you who live in Sunnyside, Catalina Foothills and Flowing Wells districts can’t take much comfort from the fact that TUSD is so awful when it comes to funding the classroom because your districts do not do much better. The highest percentage of funding that goes into classrooms among this group is the pitiful 53.2% from Flowing Wells. If I was sure the revenue generated by keeping the extra one percent in our sales tax would get into classrooms, it might have changed my mind. However, the facts are clear. There is no guarantee that money raised will actually improve student education.
This initiative is also bad public policy on several counts. While it takes away a significant part of the power to budget from the legislature it does nothing to require school districts to increase the percentage of their funding that goes into classrooms. If the true intent of those who wrote Prop 204 was to enhance the education of public school students they could have included a provision directing the money raised into the classroom without reducing current classroom spending…just as they directed the legislature to use the money raised to increase education spending above current levels. But, the fact is, they did not do this. School districts have complete discretion how to spend the money that would be generated, and given the track record of the local districts mentioned above, that is simply bad public policy.
Those who created this initiative also “sold” part of the money that would be generated if it passed to road contractors in order to get their financial support for the pro-204 campaign. They also “sold” smaller pieces of the pie to various other groups that have also signed on to support the proposition. What an awful precedent! What coalition of groups will use students as the front for raising taxes next year?
The most important public policy issue has to do with the whole notion of “budgeting by initiative.” This is permissible under the Arizona constitution, but it is bad public policy. When we go down the road of budgeting by initiative it is only a matter of time before we will find ourselves in the same financial crisis faced by California, which has done this for years. Californians have voted themselves all sorts of munificent benefits, and, at the same time, have limited the ability of the legislature to increase taxes. The result is a state getting closer to bankruptcy every day. Several California cities are already there. We elect legislators to set a budget. If they do a bad job then we need to elect better legislators who will do a better job of budgeting.
The bottom line is that whatever we think or feel about the motivation of the initiators of Proposition 204, the initiative itself should fail because it does not guarantee anything other than more money will come out of the pockets of Arizona residents (hardest hit will be the poorest Arizona residents) and go to school districts, road contractors, and assorted other groups who will share the money raised at our collective expense. Whether student education will be enhanced is very much a “maybe,” especially if you live in southern Arizona where the cost of administrators is about as high as giant saguaros, and the impact they have on student learning is about as big as a gnat.
Percent of funding that goes ito the classroom: Tucson…50.4%, Sunnyside…51.5%, Catalina Foothills…53.1%, Flowing Wells…53.2%