Today’s News Virginian has decided that unfunded mandates to education is bad.
For many politicians, passing a bill is more about getting votes for the next step up, rather than actually fixing a problem. We see this in Washington a lot, as the details such as how the bill is funded or who it impacts becomes unimportant, as long as the politician can use it to get re-elected. We’ve seen unfunded mandates come down on the state level as well, time and time again. Now Gov. McAuliffe and the General Assembly decided this year that teachers should get a 1.5 percent raise. Normally, if you’re the one ordering something to happen, that usually means you pay for it. But, as is the case with most unfunded mandates, the state only paid a portion of the bill. In Waynesboro’s case, that added up to only 43 percent or $140,000. The other 57 percent? That’s up to the school district on how it gets funded.
Thus the hue and cry from about 134 Virginia localities as local school board and supervisors — who ironically have to set their budgets long before Richmond sets the state budget — as they struggle to meet yet another load of unfunded mandates from Richmond.
It’s been said before and it bears repeating: the relationship between Richmond and the localities is broken. About half of the unfunded mandates Virginia imposes on local governments are directly aimed towards education, and in some cases, some of the mandates go into black holes where Richmond itself collects but never processes the data collected.
Worse still is the cookie cutter approach. One bill mandated Virginia libraries to staff their head librarians with a masters degree. Great if your Fairfax… but if you’re Floyd County (extra points if you are civilized enough to find it on a map without cheating) don’t need and haven’t needed that sort of requirement for several decades now. Another requirement mandating that public meetings be printed in a newspaper of record? Well… that wrankles the whip-and-buggy media to no end to even mention the idea that in the 21st century, we have this thing call the internet — Al Gore be praised — and that taxpayers shouldn’t have to subsidize print media wedded to the size and scope of their local governments.
I digress.
Enterprising souls can check out the total list of Virginia’s mandates here. The Governor’s Task Force on Local Government Mandate Review can be found here, with the interim reports of the task force listed at the bottom of the site (DISCLOSURE: your humble author served on this task force under Governor McDonnell).
While progress has been and is being made, the progress is slow in the wake of the double whammy of Richmond’s imposition in a false belief that local governments are not shouldering their fair share and a state budget that practically puts local supervisors and city council members back 2-3 cents every year, regardless as to how conservative they might be.
It would be nice for Richmond to take up the battle standard and focus on true reform. Refusing to vote for any partial or unfunded mandate to localities, fixing the toolbox so that local governments aren’t forced to use regressive means of taxation, and shifting the cost burden of education from the backs of already stressed real estate property owners and back to Virginia’s constitutional responsibility to fund education (along with some strict reforms to allow for charter schools and market alternatives to compete with the public system) are all a good start. Allowing local governments to become laboratories for pension reform would be a start as well. Tying land use decisions to transportation funding is desperately needed… just to make clear that local governments aren’t exactly clean in this exchange.
Good on the editors of the News Virginian for noticing the problem within education. The problem is unfortunately a wider one, one that requires bold moves and sound thinking to repair the relationship in Richmond. The sooner we figure it out, the cheaper (and perhaps, more bi-partisan) the solution.
If we delay until it catastrophically fails? Prepare for winners and losers… and that’s not good for anyone when a win-win is within reach.
