DENVER-
Richer school districts would be asked to essentially pay more under Gov. Bill Ritter’s plan to bring in $53 million more in taxes for education, and at least one prominent Republican on Thursday asked lawmakers to lend their support.
The latest version of Ritter’s plan, set to be formally introduced Monday, would drop property tax rates in districts with lower property values, mostly on the Eastern Plains. It would freeze the tax rates in districts that have higher values, including many in the Denver area and in resort towns like Aspen.
Frozen rates would mean tax bills would rise if property values increase in those districts. Voters in all but three of the state’s school districts have already agreed to pay more but the state’s constitutional tax and spending limits have prevented districts from keeping that money.
Former Republican Sen. Norma Anderson, who spent 19 years in the Legislature and served on Ritter’s transition team, said the plan wasn’t a tax increase and honors the will of those voters. Without a change, the state education fund is forecast to run out of money by 2012 because the state must spend more money to subsidize school districts.
“You don’t wait to fix something. You fix the leak in the dam now, not next year when it falls apart and there’s a flood,” she said, speaking as part of a coalition of educators, health care advocates and higher education officials backing the plan.
Because another voter-approved law requires education funding to increase every year, depleting the education fund would force the state to cut other programs in the budget, including higher education.
The plan has run into opposition from both Republicans, who say it’s a tax increase, and Ritter’s fellow Democrats, who control the Legislature. It seems to be running into the most trouble in the Senate.
President Joan Fitz-Gerald acknowledges that the state doesn’t have extra money to fund things like full-day kindergarten but, with less than a third of Coloradans with children in school, she wonders whether there’s the will to pass it. She said it would be easier to support such a politically-charged proposal if both members of both parties backed it.
But this week all but one of the 41 Republican state lawmakers signed a letter opposing it, saying the state needed to instead take a better look at how it was spending its existing education dollars.
Senate Minority Leader Andy McElhany, R-Colorado Springs, said the state has been too quick to spend the education fund and gotten away from just using the money to balance out the differences between rich and poor districts.
“As soon as it goes into the education fund, it gets taken out and spent. That’s why it’s going broke,” he said.
Ritter said he met with Republicans to discuss alternative proposals, including better management of state agricultural lands, and didn’t hear any plan that would get the job done. He said it would take too long to set up a better management program for state lands, which he believes the state should do anyway.
“We did not come out of that with any proposal that I felt would meet the need,” Ritter said.
Anderson, who resigned last year in part because of rising partisanship, criticized GOP lawmakers for banding together to oppose the proposal. She thinks term limits prevent lawmakers in both parties from taking difficult stands.
“Everyone runs from their shadow anymore,” said Anderson, who unsuccessfully sponsored a similar plan while in office.
