Find a better way than school bond

Published 12:06 pm Tuesday, January 25, 2011

For the past 15 years, I’ve observed the majority of Fifth District voters electing and reelecting representatives to the state legislature who promise no new taxes and to support the obligation under the Constitution to first fund the public school system. Then they go to Olympia, with Rep. Anderson customarily promptly sponsoring a bill supported by the others to honor that mandate. The remainder of the session is devoted to balancing the budget without new taxes or impacting the perks favoring big business and the rich—too often by short changing the public schools.

Is it any wonder our state ranks 49th in the nation in school funding as a percent of income? This has forced the school districts to fend for themselves through levies and bond issues funded by increases in the percentage in property taxes (based on a percentage of assessed value) leading to increasing annual charges that automatically go up with rises in assessed values.

Affluent districts like Mercer Island easily pass these propositions providing the best educations for their children. Poorer districts don’t—and those children don’t even get the benefit of equalization treatment from the state to lessen some of this unfairness. Our district is in the middle.

Now we are being asked to pass a proposition to build a new middle school that assumes no help from the state to build it. The historical rule has been the state contributing 50 percent of the cost, but the writers of this proposition know the possibility of help from this source for the forseeable future is zero.

One reason for the existence of this state of affairs is the majority of voters in this district voted against passage of Initiative 1098 last fall—an initiative specifically to provide revenues to help mitigate public school financing problems from a modest easily affordable income tax to be payable by the upper 2 percent of income earners. More importantly, they have blindly voted against any progressive income tax proposals that have led to the rating of Washington as one of the most regressive, favoring the rich, tax systems in the nation. These were self-interest votes resulting in a multiplying diminishment of student opportunities for educations preparing them to compete for a place in the middle class of the future. Sad!

Yes, my vote against this proposition may be cast as unfair to the interests of this district’s children in the public schools. It will also be the first time I have voted against funding for public schools. But it is also a vote against unfairness to retirees who own modest homes, live on Social Security, show up at the food bank for assistance and wouldn’t know where to begin to file for the exemption for which they might qualify (Check the King County website, there are more than 26,000 of these folks in the county) and shouldn’t be forced to contribute to funding this Proposition. There has to be a better way!

Dave Olson

North Bend