This year at the Colorado legislature, we took historic action to address issues that have plagued our state for far too long. One of our proudest accomplishments was taking a major step toward a more equitable school funding mechanism.
As legislators representing diverse districts, we hear a lot of stories about the struggles that students, parents and educators are facing. We also hear about constituents’ greatest hopes for public education. All of those hopes center in some way on creating a fair and sufficient system for funding schools that serves all students, regardless of where they live.
But you’ve probably heard the dire statistics: Pre-pandemic Colorado spent $2,400 less per student compared to the national average, and had some of the least competitive teacher salary in the country when accounting for cost of living.
As our school districts have increasingly leaned on their local voters for revenue to offset cuts, funding disparities between districts have widened considerably. In many circumstances, our students’ zip codes determine the educational opportunities available to them.
As legislators, we were elected to solve problems, and the glaring inequity in our school finance system, born of our regressive property tax system, is a big problem. This first layer of revenue for our schools is arbitrary and results in taxpayers in our poorest communities contributing more than their fair share to support education compared to our affluent communities.
Property owners in communities such as Pueblo, Alamosa, Greeley and Fort Morgan are forced to pay tax rates that are up to 16 times higher than taxpayers in other districts, including Cherry Creek, Aspen and Telluride.
This year, as we set out to fix this issue, the legislature sent an interrogatory to the Colorado Supreme Court and laid out the series of events that led us to where we are: When TABOR passed in 1992, its cap on revenue required local property tax rates supporting education (called “total program mill levies”) to ratchet down any time property values increased at a rate that exceeded the cap.
In response, voters in 174 of 178 school districts passed local “de-Brucing” measures, which should have allowed their schools to keep any revenue generated above the cap.
Unfortunately, the Colorado Department of Education (CDE) ignored the will of voters in these successful elections. The CDE in subsequent years lowered school district mill levies to remain under TABOR’s revenue limits, even though they were no longer subject to those limits.
Our state is committed to backfilling public schools’ funding requirements in situations where local taxes are inadequate.
The result has been devastating.
As mill levies declined, the state was on the hook to send more money to the wealthiest, fastest-growing districts with the lowest tax rates, subtracting from what would otherwise be distributed to all districts.
The bill we sponsored, HB 21-1164, starts to correct CDE’s mistake by recognizing voter intent in previous elections. The bill instructs the Department of Education to implement a correction plan to restore voter-approved mill levies, and it implements the plan gradually over the next 20 years.
The goal of our bill, signed into law by Gov. Jared Polis last week, is to ensure every property owner in Colorado pays their fair share to support education — no more and no less.
Over time, this correction will equalize the tax rate paid across the state and allow us to increase our overall investment in education – a win-win for all students and taxpayers.
The legislature put the issue in front of the Supreme Court to affirm that we are staying within the confines of the state constitution and TABOR, and in their decision issued last month, the justices overwhelmingly agreed that our plan is sound.
We are correcting Colorado’s arbitrary and inequitable K-12 property tax system because it is past time to put students first. We take seriously our responsibility to right this ship in a reasonable and incremental manner, and HB 1164 does exactly that.
Daneya Esgar is the majority leader in the Colorado House of Representatives. She is a Democrat from Pueblo. Rachel Zenzinger is a state senator representing Senate District 19 in Jefferson County.
"Opinion" - Google News
June 28, 2021 at 11:21PM
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Opinion: A fix — finally — for our broken, disparate K-12 revenue system - The Denver Post
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