SCHOOL FUNDING CAUGHT IN CUL-DE-SAC

“If we had some bread we could have a ham sandwich, if we had some ham.”

That vaudevillian knee-slapper seems oddly relevant this week following County Mayor Jim Coppinger’s presentation of the fiscal 2018 budget’s funding for Hamilton County. Not surprisingly, special attention has been paid to the continuing shortfall in funding the county schools’ needs.

The school system is trapped in a bureaucratic cul-de-sac by an untenable logic that some have asserted in the past. The argument is that county commissioners cannot provide the funds needed for crucial services until the school system improves its effectiveness. Meanwhile, the inadequate funding for the services in question prevents the school district from achieving the hoped-for systemwide improvement.

Coppinger in effect endorsed that logic in his budget presentation. The county school board presented Coppinger with a balanced $372.8 million budget, included in the county’s $691.5 million spending plan. However, that plan did not include $24 million the school board requested for other needs. And worse, no proposed funding for school capital projects. When the fiscal 2019 budget is presented next year, the unfunded $200 million in deferred maintenance of school properties will be a lot higher.

Coppinger said the county’s overall funding requests (clearly not all will be funded) tally $732 million and would require a property tax increase of about 60 cents. County agencies typically do not expect full approval of their budget requests, but they, like the school system with its maintenance dilemma, cannot fully serve the public without occasional tax increases.

The county receives added funding every year from increased sales tax revenue and more property tax revenue as new residential and business construction goes on the tax rolls. One problem: those funding sources can be susceptible to downward fluctuations in the economy.

It is disappointing that the county mayor felt it necessary to cite the public’s perception that “we waste a lot of money, not just in the school system but in the government in general.”

There is a simple response to that perception: Of course there is waste in government. Even business executives would acknowledge waste in the private sector, as well. After all, both entities employ fallible persons.

Coppinger’s reference to fiscal waste in government is a first cousin to the promised battle against “waste, fraud and abuse.” That’s the cliche offered by countless political candidates, most of whom have little else to offer and thus rarely get elected.

The discussion about government waste, however, is irrelevant. It is more important to remember that county commissioners are up for election in 2018, and that it is traditionally considered unwise to vote for a tax increase a year before an election. That doesn’t explain why commissioners did not vote for a tax increase a year after more recent county elections. Well, there is one possible explanation. Most officeholders with budget oversight are loath to vote for a tax increase lest that vote might endanger their incumbency. To the extent that Hamilton County commissioners share that mindset, they may also believe that voters with long memories will not vote for them even three years after a tax increase.

You’d think commissioners would thus support legislation providing school board members, who are themselves elected, with the authority to raise taxes. Many communities nationwide entrust school boards with that responsibility but there has been resistance to that concept in Tennessee.

That resistance suggests that only certain officeholders — county commissioners, say — have the wisdom to decide when a tax increase is justified. A knee-jerk resistance to change, even on this issue, indicates blind allegiance to the lame assertion that “we never did it that way before.”