Education mandates tie up state cash flow

By John Fryar
The Daily Times-Call

DENVER — Several key lawmakers expressed concerns Monday over the state’s annually escalating share of responsibility for covering a majority of the present multibillion-dollar system of funding Colorado’s public schools.
None of the Legislature’s Joint Budget Committee members or any of the other lawmakers attending a Monday morning JBC briefing objected to the overall projected $5.1 billion price tag of Public School Finance Act distributions to Colorado’s 178 school districts in 2007-08.
However, some of those lawmakers indicated that sometimes-conflicting fiscal mandates and constraints within the Colorado Constitution continue to require the state to absorb increasing portions of the cost of paying for most of the day-to-day expenses of operating the state’s public schools.
Carolyn Kampman, one of the JBC’s staff analysts, said that of the nearly $5.1 billion in spending that the Public School Finance Act might amount to in 2007-08, more than $3.2 billion would have to come from various state budget accounts. The other $1.8 billion would come from property taxes and specific ownership taxes paid directly to the local school districts.
Kampman reported that between 1993-94, when the basic framework of the state’s school-funding law was first adopted, and the current 2006-07 budget year, when funding under that act is expected to total nearly $4.8 billion, the state’s annual share of that funding package has grown from 54.3 percent of the total to about 64 percent.
“The local-share issue is huge,” Boulder Democratic Rep. Jack Pommer said after Monday’s meeting.
Amendment 23, a measure Colorado voters approved in 2000, ensures annual increases in the base level of the Public School Finance Act’s per-student funding, but other constitutional provisions have meant the Legislature might face having to cut other state programs and services to meet that school-finance mandate, said Pommer, a JBC member and Amendment 23 supporter.
House Education Committee chairman Mike Merrifield, D-Manitou Springs, another staunch Amendment 23 fan, said the shifting of school-funding burden to the state budget is a concern, “but what can you do about it” without voters approving changes to things like the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights?
TABOR and the Gallagher Amendment, a 1982 constitutional change intended to protect residential property owners from some of that era’s growing tax burdens, are provisions that voters alone could change, noted Boulder Democratic Sen. Ron Tupa, soon to be vice chairman of the Senate Education Committee.
He said, however, that he didn’t know any solutions to the state-local share situation “that are viable.”
“We still haven’t cracked that nut,” Tupa said.
Merrifield said, “We have to bite the bullet and talk to the public about how they want to finance public education” in the future.
Senate Education Committee chairwoman Sue Windels, D-Arvada, agreed: “The only real solution lies in getting public support” for one or more school-finance-related ballot items.
John Fryar can be reached by e-mail at jfryar@times-call.com.