The results of the Nov. 6 school levy referendums throughout Minnesota sent confounding and disquieting messages.
More than half the districts told voters that meager revenue increases granted by the Legislature for the 2002-03 biennium weren’t enough to maintain current teaching staffs, busing services, sports teams and other programs. A base increase of 2.6 percent per year isn’t enough to beat inflation, and some districts won’t even get that much, according to the state’s own figures.
At the same time, legislators eliminated the general education levy paid by local taxpayers, making schools far more dependent on state revenue than they’d been in the past. Legislators also assumed payment of $415 per pupil in districts’ voter-approved excess-levy authority. The latter change invited some metropolitan districts that had labored for years under an excess-levy cap to return to their voters for more tax revenue.
In the metropolitan area, two-thirds of the levies failed and 10 passed. The numbers were reversed in outstate districts, which have lower levels of excess-levy authority and derived more benefit from the $415 takeover.
The election results pose nagging questions in a year when voter turnout and attention paid to school levies reached all-time highs.
Did the attacks of Sept. 11 dampen taxpayers’ spirits? The sagging economy, with its mass layoffs at Northwest Airlines and elsewhere? Or was it the noisy, metro-centered, anti-levy campaign fomented by the Taxpayers League of Minnesota and even Gov. Jesse Ventura?
Before this year many Minnesotans probably hadn’t heard of the Taxpayers League, which promoted a campaign against school districts and local governments that would plot to take away the bounty of property-tax cuts in the Legislature’s sweeping tax-reform package. Had the Legislature provided even adequate increases in school aid, or not selected winners and losers in its distribution of aid to cities, this argument begin to have merit.
At the same time he was stressing local accountability in the tax system, Gov. Jesse Ventura questioned the levy referendum in his own district, sending a message he knew would resonate far beyond Osseo.
Or did local districts fail to communicate their need? Did they lack reservoirs of goodwill from which to derive “yes” votes? Why, for example, would a levy fail in Burnsville-Eagan-Savage but pass easily in neighboring Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan, where two previously failed levies in a politically fractious district suggested anything but easy passage?
We hope this election season doesn’t poison the well for future referendums. The state is falling short in its constitutional responsibility to educate children precisely at the time when it is assuming more of the cost. School districts are now dangerously reliant on a state whose revenue collections are plummeting amid economic recession.
Legislators delivered their property-tax cut. Now is no time for a tax revolt.
Editor’s note: This editorial was a product of the ECM Editorial Board.
