Testimony in Opposition to LD 1739: "An Act to Remove the Requirement That the Annual Budget of a Regional School Unit Be Approved at a Budget Validation Referendum"
January 25, 2010Author: Steven Bowen
Source: Center for Education Excellence
Testimony regarding L.D. 1739,
An Act to Remove the Requirement That the Annual Budget of a Regional School Unit Must Be Approved at a Budget Validation Referendum
Stephen Bowen
The Maine Heritage Policy Center
Senator Alfond, Representative Sutherland, men and women of the Committee,
My name is Stephen Bowen. I direct the Center for Education Excellence at The Maine Heritage Policy Center, a public policy research organization based in Portland. I come before you today to testify in strong opposition to LD 1739, which would take away from the people of Maine their right to a referendum vote on school budgets.
I’d like to begin my testimony today by expressing deep concern regarding the lack of advance notice about this public hearing. I am someone who pays quite a lot of attention to the work of this committee, yet even I was not aware of the existence of this bill until the middle of last week, and I know that the public hearing on this bill was not scheduled until late last week, perhaps as late as Friday, which is when I first heard of it.
This is a hearing on a bill to take away the voting rights of Maine people, and this committee gave Maine people little more than 72 hours of advance notice about it.
I realize, of course, that the presiding officers are well within their rights to waive public notice requirements. But given the gravity of this bill, and that so many members of this committee, including the chairs, have expressed opposition to the budget validation process (at least in e-mails obtained by the Kennebec Journal under the Freedom of Access Act), it would have been far more just for the committee to give the people of Maine more than a few days notice of this hearing.
Moving on to the bill itself, where to begin?
Setting aside for a moment the merits of budget validation as a budget approval process, this bill is completely needless for the simple reason that voters in nearly every Maine school district will be able to choose for themselves whether they wish to continue using this process or not. Why should the Legislature preempt voters and make that decision for them?
With regard to budget validation itself, I grant that it is not as smooth a process as it might be, but democracy works that way. Giving people a voice is costly and time consuming, but it is surely preferable to denying them a voice entirely.
Furthermore, the research we have done suggests that budget validation is more than paying for itself by generating school budget savings.
In a 2008 report, which I have attached, we found that districts which used the budget validation process prior to its becoming a state mandate had annual school budget growth below the state average. We calculated that had state average school budget growth been held to the rate of increase achieved by the SAD’s using the budget validation process, Maine taxpayers would have saved almost $40 million from FY 2005 to FY 2006.
In the report we are releasing today, we find that budget validation has resulted in substantial taxpayer savings. From FY 1999 to FY 2008, total state and local K-12 spending grew by an average annual rate of 4.8 percent. In none of those ten years did total K-12 spending decline from the year before, despite plummeting school enrollment.
Total state and local school spending for FY 2009, however, which was the first year in which school budgets were developed using the budget validation process, was actually lower than the year before by .8 percent. This resulted in $15 million in savings to Maine taxpayers.
If school spending for FY 2009 had grown at the same 4.8 percent rate that it grew, on average, every year during the decade prior to budget validation, FY 2009 budgets would have grown by $96 million over FY 2008 levels. Instead, they dropped $15 million, for a net savings to Maine taxpayers, in one year, of more than $112 million.
You can open a lot of polling places, buy a lot of paper ballots, and pay a lot of election workers with that kind of money.
Maine schools today educate 60,000 fewer students than they did 40 years ago, yet our spending has continued to climb unabated. Today, our per-pupil spending is 12th highest in the nation, and, when calculated as a percent of gross state product, third highest in the nation. As the current budget shortfall illustrates clearly, we cannot continue to endure the kind of spending increases we have seen in recent years.
Budget validation, in the short time we’ve used it, has done what LD1, EPS and district reorganization have failed to do, which is to contain rising costs and generate savings for taxpayers.
Eliminating it is not only undemocratic, but, given the financial challenges facing the state, unwise.
I thank the committee for its time, and I am happy to answer any questions.
