Idaho legislators champion local control. So why do they treat local officials like children?
Our state legislators continue to treat our local elected officials like unruly children who need to be scolded and told what to do and when to do it.
Already, we’ve had a plethora of bills, telling school boards not to get rid of mascots, limiting how much city councils can increase property taxes and telling school districts how to teach science standards. We’ll increase the sales tax and raise your allowance, but you can’t have supplemental levies anymore.
Now we have a bill that tells school boards that if a bond measure fails, they have to wait at least 11 months before they can ask again.
What kind of micromanaging is this?
Leave our school board members alone. They’re doing the best they can with the tools — scratch that, the only tool they have at their disposal — to keep a nonleaking roof over our kids’ heads while they try to learn something.
You want to do your part, legislators? Rather than debating what additional handcuffs you’re going to put on our school board members, you should be debating the merits of allowing school districts to collect impact fees so that they can build those new schools to accommodate for growth without having to beg existing property taxpayers every time.
If you have any doubts as to whether legislators think “the locals” are a bunch of children, consider this quote Monday from Rep. Julianne Young, R-Blackfoot, as she weighed in supporting the bill.
“I can tell you that just from the perspective of a parent, if I tell a child, ‘no,’ and they come back 10 minutes later or five minutes later or 30 seconds later, and ask again, and then they come back 30 seconds later, and ask again, I start to experience parent fatigue,” Young said during Monday’s hearing before the House State Affairs Committee.
Rep. Heather Scott, R-Blanchard, who introduced the bill Monday, said she’s trying “to protect voters from aggressive taxing districts” that “ignore the vote of the people” and bring bond measures back for a vote just a couple of months after it failed at the polls. She said the effort is meant to “grind the voter down.”
No, it’s not. The effort is a bunch of volunteers in a thankless job staying up late on a Tuesday night trying to figure out how to cram 800 elementary school students in 600-capacity school that was just built two years ago.
Philip Neuhoff, school board member for West Ada school district, testified that his district over the past four years has added about 600 students every year, the equivalent of one elementary school’s worth of students.
Having sat through hours of school board meetings as school board members agonize over whether to ask voters for a bond to build a new school or make necessary repairs, I can attest first-hand that these school board members don’t comprise “aggressive taxing districts,” and I know these decisions are never taken lightly.
As Rep. Elaine Smith, D-Pocatello, asked during Monday’s hearing, “What have you got against local control?”
Russ Johnson, who lives in Canyon County (“where we’re not known for being lovers of taxes”) and serves on the Kuna school board, agreed.
“On the basis of that local control, it just seems to me that the school boards are in the best position to make those determinations, to make those decisions as to the needs,” Johnson said.
Idaho Freedom Foundation vice president Fred Birnbaum proclaimed that 11 months is “eminently reasonable.” Says who? Why? On what basis? Making kids wait another year to get out of a substandard school building or holding classes in hallways and broom closets doesn’t sound eminently reasonable to me.
Karen Echeverria, Idaho School Boards Association executive director, called Scott’s bill “a solution in search of a problem,” citing data showing that since 2002, there have been 257 bond elections. Of those 257 bond elections, only 12 school districts ran more than one bond election back to back. With 115 districts, that means only 8% ran a bond election in any given year, and of those elections, about 4% ran an election more than once.
Further, of the 12 elections that ran back-to-back, only two passed on the second election.
So this bill addresses only 4% of the districts and only three or four districts in the past 17 years.
Here’s something else legislators could spend its time working on: Getting rid of the two-thirds supermajority required to pass these bonds. Why does it take two “yes” votes to overcome one “no” vote to pass a bond? Whatever happened to one man, one vote? In this scenario, a person voting “yes” gets only a half of a vote.
Echeverria, superintendents from Vallivue and Emmett and school board members all testified Monday to the high threshold for bond measures. Most of these bond measures that failed actually won the approval of a majority of voters but fell short of the two-thirds supermajority.
Scott and others on the committee compared the ability of districts to rerun a bond measure after three months with legislative races, arguing legislators don’t have to come back up for a vote every three months. When you win, you win, and you’re in office for two years, they argued. Well, what if we said in the next election Heather Scott has to receive 66.7 percent of the vote to stay in office? Would that be fair?
The bar is already set high to pass a bond; legislators shouldn’t be cooking up new ways to make it even harder.
Let us make these decisions at the local level. If we don’t like a bond that we just voted against three months ago, we’ll vote against it again. If we think our school board members are some sort of marauding band of aggressive thieves stealing our money by asking for bonds to build a new school, then we’ll vote them out in the next election. That’s how this thing works.
The committee eventually voted along party lines, 12-3, to send the bill to the floor with a “do-pass” recommendation. The full House voted, 48-21, on Thursday to approve it and send it to the Senate.
If the state legislators really want to help, they can start a statewide building fund to help school districts pay for new schools either due to dilapidated conditions or because of growth.
The reason this bill is a solution in search of a problem is because it’s looking for the wrong problem. The problem isn’t aggressive taxing districts; taxing districts asking for bonds is a symptom of the real problem, which doesn’t get addressed with this bill.
The real problem that legislators should be addressing is that the only mechanism Idaho has to fund school construction is on the backs of property taxpayers.
For that problem, there are plenty of solutions out there, other than simply finding yet another way to make it even more difficult to build new schools.
Legislators need to quit treating our superintendents and school board volunteers like a bunch of children and thieves and give them the tools they need to do their jobs.
This story was originally published January 28, 2020 at 10:40 AM.
