Election Day
Today we did have an election in Washington state, although it wasn’t a presidential primary. No, there were only two items on the ballot, both of them school property tax levies (in Seattle at least). The first was a renewal of an “operating levy”, which no one had any serious opposition to. The second was a capital/maintenance levy. To understand the opposition to this one, you have to know about the $35 million budget shortfall discovered last year that drove the current superintendent out of his job. Opponents say that the second levy is an attempt by the school system to fund the shortfall from taxes instead of cutting their budget in proper contrition.
My feeling is that the schools are so strapped that, even if they had anticipated the shortfall, there was no place to cut anyway, and the lapse in apprehending it merely gave students and teachers a one-year reprieve from the particularities of “no child left behind” and its progeny. Under this assumption, the $35 million was money the system should have had in the first place, and I have no problem giving it to them retroactively. It comes as no surprise, then, that I cajoled my kid to the polls, and we both voted for both levies. My property tax bill includes a hefty assessment to fund the Port of Seattle, basically subsidizing businesses like fucking cruise ships that should be pulling their own weight, and I have no direct electoral influence over this assessment. My preference would be to charge Grandma from Peoria another $5 a day to subsidize the Port, and leave the levy headroom for schools. But that’s another kettle of dead or dying fish.
My gripe about these levies is that a lot of what they are paying for is “basic education”, which is constitutionally the responsibility of the legislature through the state’s general fund. The idea is that, buy making more of public education the state’s responsibility, there is less tendency for rich communities, high in property tax base and low in expensive and problematic poor and bilingual kids, to create education theme parks for their kids while inner city schools rot.
In the 70s, the Seattle city schools sued the state to force it to accept and pay for this constitutional responsibility. They won, and the result was property tax levy lids designed to prevent the aforementioned disparities, coupled with a charge to the legislature to fully fund “basic education”.
Of course, they’ve steadily reneged over the years. They’ve been too concerned, since Republicans have surged to within a hairsbreadth of controlling the state, with tax cuts and the almost impossible calisthenic of running a progressive state budget without an income tax of any kind. Hundreds, maybe thousands, became fabulously wealthy here in the dot-com 90s, but paid nothing back to the state. Instead, the poor, the young and middle class support the state’s general fund through sales taxes and property taxes.
Anyway, I can’t fix the state’s fiscal mess, but I can directly help my local schools by voting for these levies. They have a nearly impossible gauntlet to run today. Property tax levies require a 60% “supermajority” to pass, plus, since this is an off-year election, the number of “yes” votes has to be at least 24% of the entire number of notes cast in the November election. I’m not holding my breath.
