[Local-Maine-Schools] Taxation fractures

[Brian Hubbell]

Looks like the school reform issue has opened a fracture even within
the Taxation Committee.

A subcommittee of Taxation reported back to Appropriations this
afternoon, The three subcommittee members were Representative Woodbury
from Yarmouth, Representative Watson from Bath, and (I think)
Representative Chase from Wells.

Their subcommittee was formed to respond to the section of the
Governor's budget that proposes to require that savings through school
consolidation be returned as property tax savings.

Regarding this, they considered  three points.

1) What to use to evaluate, compare, and measure the financial
performance of school administrative units and provide greater "budget
transparency" to voters.

2) What the spending threshold should be for triggering a
district-wide referendum.

3) What the penalties should be for districts that override the
spending threshold.

With the first matter, the subcommittee readily agreed to recommend
the use of the EPS model with great emphasis on detailed
"transparency" of each specific area within the model to provide
taxpayers with easy to understand comparisons between EPS limits and
spending across different districts

Also in the third matter of penalties, they readily reached consensus
that penalties were not desirable when informed communities knowingly
voted to override.

It was the second matter of threshold that caused a split in
recommendations.  Representative Woodbury recommends that a referendum
be required only when the rate of a school budget increase exceeds the
percentage of growth allowed the district under EPS This would mean
that a referendum would not be required for budgets which overall
exceed EPS but are growing at a slower rate.

The other two subcommittee members hold that a referendum should be
required in any instance in which a budget exceeds EPS --
acknowledging that, with 70% of the existing school units presently
spending above EPS, that this means that for the foreseeable future
this means that school budgets generally would be passed largely only
by referendum.
All agreed on transparency on the basis of EPS.

As, this prompted a fair amount of interested discussion from
Appropriations Committee members about which of those two models --
braking applied either to growth or absolute dollars -- better
reflected what they take to be an implied mandate to pass through
property tax relief resulting from school savings.

....Or, perhaps more to the point, which better inoculated legislators
against voter complaints that they were either being overly
restrictive or not being forceful enough.