A legislative proposal to exact financial punishment on school districts that choose to revert to their original TABOR revenue limits might initially seem unfair.
District voters ought to be able to “re-Bruce” and lower their local taxes after the state froze the rates in 2007, right?
Yes and no. Sure, they should be able to decide whether to opt into or out of the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights provisions that govern local property tax revenues.
However, that decision has a ripple effect. Re-Brucing would result in the state having to backfill lost local revenue for schools, and that is not fair either, since other state needs would suffer as a result.
That’s why we support Senate Bill 291, which has passed the Senate and is heading to the House for a vote. The bill aims to slow a troubling trend in which the state is assuming an increasing proportion of the costs of K-12 education, rather than local districts.
The crux of the issue is the School Finance Act, which since 1952 has been a mechanism that attempts to equalize K-12 education spending across the state.
The Colorado Constitution requires the state legislature to provide a uniform and free system of public schools throughout the state. The School Finance Act is the vehicle that attempts to close the gap between rich and poor districts when it came to per pupil funding.
The act has been amended numerous times over the years, but its overarching goal is to augment local revenues with state funding so the financial resources don’t vary so widely district-by-district.
Problems began to arise after voters approved TABOR in 1992. That’s in part because TABOR’s revenue limits meant school districts collected less money, which resulted in the state paying a larger and larger portion of the cost of K-12 education. In 1994, local districts raised 47 percent of the cost of educating students. By 2007, that proportion was only 36 percent.
At the same time, local school districts came to realize that because of TABOR, they were increasingly unable to keep revenues from the School Finance Act and other sources, such as some grants.
Of the state’s 178 school districts, 175 of them went to voters and asked for a TABOR waiver, colloquially called “de-Brucing,” a reference to TABOR author Douglas Bruce.
Now, at least one county is talking about “re-Brucing,” which would shift more K-12 costs to a state already struggling with huge deficits.
SB 291 quite simply says that districts that re-Bruce would get no additional state money. Districts could still re-Bruce, but it’s hard to imagine any would if this passes.
As always, the real solution is to clean up the state constitution and remove the revenue limits and other provisions that so frequently put lawmakers in a Catch-22. But in the short term, SB 291 is a reasonable move to discourage local districts from unfairly passing the buck on K-12 education costs.
