Concessions Sought to Fix Budget Glitch : Finances: A Democratic state senator and an education coalition want the governor and GOP lawmakers to give schools more taxing power.
SACRAMENTO — A key Democratic state senator and a coalition of education groups vowed Thursday to demand concessions from Gov. Pete Wilson and Republican legislators before agreeing to fix a $1-billion technical error in the state budget approved last summer.
But a Wilson spokesman said the governor wouldn’t pay political tribute to obtain legislative support for correcting the costly glitch in a measure that helped settle last year’s record-setting budget stalemate.
Sen. Gary Hart (D-Santa Barbara), chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said he intended to use the error as leverage to force Wilson and Republican lawmakers to agree to give schools more power to raise local taxes for education programs.
Hart also said he wants Wilson to abandon efforts to require schools to keep hourly attendance records as a way of ensuring that they actually are teaching as many students as they are claiming when seeking reimbursement from the state.
The error at issue was in a bill that was supposed to allow the state to deduct from future education funding $1.1 billion the schools got in the 1991-92 fiscal year beyond the minimum they were guaranteed by the state Constitution. Unless the mistake is fixed by new legislation, the schools will be entitled to that extra money, and their constitutional minimum will be higher every year from now on.
Hart, joined by school administrators, school board members and representatives of teacher unions, said the coalition is prepared to agree to fix the error and will accept Wilson’s proposal to give schools the same amount per pupil in the next school year as they are getting now.
In exchange, he said, Wilson should agree to give local school districts the right to raise taxes with a majority vote of their constituents--instead of the two-thirds margin required under current law.
On the attendance issue, he said, Wilson should drop his proposal to deduct funding from schools if they can’t show that their students are in class for at least four hours a day. Instead, Hart said, that money should pay for new programs aimed at boosting attendance at problem schools.
Hart said his proposed deal is fair to all sides in the school funding dispute and ought to be separated from the rest of the budget and approved quickly.
“If we don’t accept that, then all bets are off and we go back to ground zero and the school community can lobby for whatever they want,†he said.
Dan Schnur, Wilson’s communications director, said the Legislature is obligated to stand by its agreement with the governor without attaching additional conditions. Wilson may ultimately support greater taxing powers for the schools, Schnur said, but not in trade for fixing the $1-billion error.
“We’re not going to give them further concessions just to get them to live up to that agreement,†he said.
Schnur said he welcomed Hart’s support for Wilson’s proposal to give schools about $4,200 per pupil in state and local tax dollars. But he said the senator’s commitment is meaningless unless he also will support Wilson’s proposal to shift $2.6 billion in property tax revenues to the schools. Hart said those details should be settled later.
“You can’t agree to spend a certain amount of money unless you agree on where that money is going to come from,†Schnur said. “You can’t separate those issues.â€
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