Please help me find some truth. My wife and I are members of our kids local PTA for an elementary in the Lake Washington School District. We getting literature from the local PTA chapter saying how supporting I-695 will hurt schools. My wife and I have differing views. She believes strongly the passage of I-695 will lead to the state cutting funding to the schools. I feel we are being pushed into voting no as a scare tactic. State government has a fundamental obligation to support schools. This initiative is more about challenging how taxes are levied. Any measure that gives voters more say can't be all bad. Doen't this measure allow more freedom of choice for taxpayers. I thought that was one of the primary principles for which we fought a revolutionary war over?

Also, I don't get the rationale regarding the funds lost ($1.8 billion)if the measure passes. I mean is everyone going to take this money and stick in their mattress? HELLO, won't people spend some of it (creating sales or other misc. taxes)? The state is going to get back some of it anyway.

It sounds to me this measure will just make state and local jurisdictions more accountable. How is that bad?

Would appreciate your feedback, especially on the hurting school argument. Thank you.

-- Tim Nappen (nappen.t@LNTCO.com), October 12, 1999

Answers

Tim, First off how much of the MVET NOW goes to schools??? None? Second. Don't we always vote on school levies to provide funding for schools? Yes. Does I-695 stop you from having school levies? No. It just asks the people to decide about other places that their tax money is to be spent.

We have been taking care of schools with special ballots all along so what is going to stop it??

Now since the provisions are already in place to take care of the schools what is going to make the state remove the funding?

If they remove the funding from the schools they are doing something highly illegal. But they are the government and the can do illegal things whenever they want to.

I-695 will probably shut down the 'Jerry Springer' programs that now operate in this state because the politicians will be afraid to request addition funding for 'One -legged lesbians who have divorced their husbands and have married their mother-in-laws'

Rational, reasonable programs will continue to be funded but the flaky stuff won't get through anymore.

-- maddjak (maddjak@hotmail.com), October 12, 1999.

-maddjak

I detect some highly circular logic emerging in the yes i-695 arguments. While no one person may have uttered all the arguments, it all gets back to chsing it tail when assertions by the Yes crowd go unchallenged.

I believe there is a consensus that 695 passage will cut a huge chunk of revenue out of the state budget as a whole. Currently this money is earmarked for transportation, small-town police & fire, and a few other things. The argument by the "yes on 695" crowd is that the slack will be taken up by the current surpluses that exist in the form of "rainy day" funds in the general fund. Now the argument was also made (by you) that schools are funded by special elections. This is true only to a point. While a good portion is derived from these property tax levies, the state has attempted to "equalize" things between the richer and poorer districts by funding many programs out of the general fund. While it may be true that it would be "illegal" for money to be taken away from schools because of i-695, it is just a matter of making this shift of funds from the general fund to cover these "essential services", which would not be illegal, but would require a 2/3 supermajority in the state legislator.

The other issue is that some communities may choose to attempt to provide these essential services by property tax, which would now be their only source of raising funds. While such a proposition may pass, it also would probably require a 60% favorable vote, as is now required to pass special school levies. It would also then make it even harder to pass school levies, since the familiar refrain "my property taxes are already too high" would be inevitable. While granny may vote for fire/police protection, she may see no point in educating the young hooligans in her neighborhood if her own grandkids actually reside in the neighboring community.

So yes, I believe that 695 will harm education, just as it will harm every other program that has difficulty garnering a 60% voting majority. Not only because the funds it recieves from the general fund will now be harder to come by, but also because property taxes may go up as well to fill the gaps.

-- Concerned WA Parent (xxx@yyy.zzz), October 12, 1999.

Well to offer a little counter to Maddjak's standard don't worry (about the program cuts), be happy (about the tax cuts) stance, there does stand to be some issues with school spending should 695 pass. No, none of the MVET funding currently goes towards public education (unless you count the account that helps build sidewalks and other pedestrian items around schools.) However, as Tim Eyman is fond of saying, 695 would force all governments that receive MVET funding to reprioritize spending. That includes the state government, which funds a sizable amount of the state's public education system. Since a great deal of the state budget is dedicated towards public education, it stands to reason that some of that reprioritization will come from it.

The state, of course, is constitutionally mandated to fund "basic education," but it's not like there is some magic number that the state has to stick by. In fact, the amount of state funding for public education has been dropping substantially over the past decade or so, and has been requiring local districts to cover more and more of the expenses. So the idea that public education funding is constitutionally immune to cuts is simply not true.

Actually, the primary principle behind the revolution was to fight against taxation without representation. School boards do represent you, and they are the ones who figure out the taxation. Most of the Founding Fathers either were silent on direct democracy or spoke out against it.

Finally, there is the entire issue about forcing every since proposed fee increase to a vote of the district. Since you would basically have to bring together quite a number of fees to come close to breaking even, it is doubtful that most would even be considered to be raised (something that many supporters here think is a good thing). But instead of raising the fee to cover the increased costs, the school will have to look elsewhere. For example, say the cost of cleaning towels and replacing old ones goes up. Currently districts just raise the cost of the towel fee to cover it. But since a $.25 increase in the towel fee won't cover the cost of the election, the board will forgo a fee increase. And since it can't exactly eliminate the need for clean towels, it will have to find the funding elsewhere. Therefore pulling funding away from one program to subsidize another. For those against the ferries being subsidized, I would think that you would consider this a bad thing.

-- Patrick (patrick1142@yahoo.com), October 12, 1999.

concerned WA parent--"So yes, I believe that 695 will harm education, just as it will harm every other program that has difficulty garnering a 60% voting majority. Not only because the funds it receives from the general fund will now be harder to come by, but also because property taxes may go up as well to fill the gaps."

***** OFF-TOPIC alert *****

I find it shocking that you think this is a bad thing. In general, even though it "feels good", there's no evidence that property tax equalization for schools has helped achievement at all. When tax equalization laws are passed, property-wealthy communities generally dramatically reduce their property tax burdens (put more simply: why bother paying a relatively larger property tax when the money doesn't get used locally). Do the bad schools get better. . .no, the good schools just get progressively worse. In one way, if your goal is education parity, it's reasonable to call property tax equalization a success. Unfortunately, it achieves this parity by lowering the good schools to the level of the bad ones.

In general, there's a good bit of research showing how local funding of schools via property taxes leads to good local schools. In a nutshell, the benefit has to do with the symbiotic relationship between property values and good schools.

For the interested, a well-known researcher in this area is Caroline Hoxby from Harvard (a well-known conservative thinktank ;-)). Another researcher who has investigated this topic thoroughly is an economics professor at Dartmouth (although I don't currently remember his name).

-- Brad (knotwell@my-deja.com), October 12, 1999.

Hi Brad --- You lost me a bit. I'm at a bit of a loss trying to determine which of my ideas you are shocked that I hold. I can tell you that while not an extremist, I do believe in educational equalization, but we may have different understandings of how that works. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe all property tax levy's for the schools go to the districts that vote for them. The equalization I mentioned is thateach district gets the lions share of it's funding via the states general fund, and is therefore not affected by individual levy's. This in turn prevents the schools of any particular school to get *too* bad, while allowing them to allocate more funds as they are able to convince the voters.

It is because so much of their funding comes from the general fund that educational funds are put at risk by 695. As I stated previously, I believe education funds derived from property taxes are also at risk for the reasons stated.

The non-specific "gloom and doom" you are tired of hearing about from the anti-695 crowd is just because we don't know any more than you guys do what the impact will be. On our side, we believe it is irresponsible to advocate this de-funding without fully understanding it's affects. For my part, I would not be opposed to tax relief, be it MVET, Prop Taxes or Sales Taxes, if I knew that they were offset by specific program cuts... although I would really like to know what programs were being cut. This propositionjust cuts the funds, with vague promises that the "surplus" which doesn't even exist as a true surplus, will keep us afloat until our politicians (who we apparently couldn't trust in the first place) gets everything balanced out. In the meantime, if we want to fund some of the things being cut, we have to pass new taxes (which is being done as we speak to get it done before the 2nd feature of the measure kicks in) which will require asking citizens to raise taxes right after they voted to lower them. In the meantime, Jan 1 will come down like a hammer elliminating programs due to lake of funds, until the legislature can react.

-- Concerned WA Parent (xxx@yyy.zzz), October 12, 1999.

concerned WA parent--

Looking back on it, I wouldn't have written the diatribe I did. The conclusions are apparently not directly applicable to Washington.

-- Brad (knotwell@my-deja.com), October 13, 1999.