A New Kind of Local Control

The Regional Solution
by
Walt Freed

Walt Freed served six terms in the Vermont House retiring as Speaker at the end of 2004.  He is out of politics, for now, but he is still paying attention.  (Which is more than one can say for some people who are still in politics.)   Like a lot of Vermonters, Freed is troubled by the way the state finances education and the evident inability of the current legislature to come up with anything more than duct tape fixes for the statewide property tax system.  Unlike most of the rest of us, Mr. Freed has taken the trouble to propose an actual, comprehensive solution which he has been generous enough to elaborate on here.

The premise of Act 60, The Equal Educational Opportunity Act of 1997, (and the Vermont Supreme Court Brigham decision) was that a student, irrespective of the town of residence, would have the same opportunity for educational success if the voters approving a school budget had the same taxable resources available for all students.

Although many of us have questioned the validity of that premise over the past ten years I offered an alternative proposal during my last term to equalize resources on a countywide basis instead of a statewide basis.  It was my belief that voters would respond more favorably to sharing their property tax base if it was done on a more local basis than across the entire state.  Hence the countywide school district approach. 

When you compare equalized education grand list per pupil almost every county of the state has rich towns and poor towns.  Statewide the richest town (Stratton) has almost 100 times more taxable real estate per pupil than the poorest town (Hardwick).  Yet when you make the same comparison on a countywide basis, the richest county (Grand Isle) has only 2.5 times more taxable real estate than the poorest county (Franklin).  Keep in mind that rich and poor are defined not only in terms of total grand list but also in terms of total residents in need of a public education. 

The greatest flaw in the statewide property tax system is the voters’ inability to connect to the public school system where their tax dollars are being spent.  To be supportive they need to touch, see, and hear their tax dollars at work.  Property owners in Stratton would be far more supportive of a tax increase if they thought it was paying for the school in nearby Newfane than if it is funding the school in Barre where they are not likely to know anyone.  The same argument could be made for a taxpayer in Maidstone, Westmore or Stowe.  I would suggest replacing the statewide grandlist with countywide grandlists with some modifications. (For obvious reasons I would combine Essex with Orleans, Grand Isle with Franklin, and divide Chittenden in half.)  The state’s resources from the General Fund would still be needed to balance the resources between counties but this approach would be far simpler and much less remote.  Each county would have one taxing authority and one tax rate.  If you are thinking “loss of local control” you could have much more influence setting the county tax rate than you did this year when the legislature set the statewide tax rate.  Yet property taxes would still be just as painful if we failed to deal with the spending side of the formula.

Representative school boards could be elected within each of the 13 taxing districts and they would operate the schools within those districts.  This would allow for much greater economies of scale than currently exist.  Imagine Bennington County with one school board instead of twenty.  There could be one superintendent, one teachers’ contract, one treasurer and bookkeeping system, one purchasing agent, one health insurance plan, etc.  for the whole county.  If enrollment was down in one school, teachers who had been laid off there could be offered positions in another school within the district.   Students could also be allowed the flexibility of school choice as it would have little financial impact on the district. To maintain neighborhood involvement, each school could have advisory boards to provide input and guidance to the regional school board. 

Our counties are small.  It’s time to define “local” as a region of the state, such as a county, but more than just an individual town.  It’s time for Manchester to have a vested interest in Bennington’s success; for Stowe to partner with Hyde Park, and for Hartford to realize it has more in common with Woodstock than with Lebanon.  This type of regional cooperation will not only improve education and lower costs, it will also strengthen the economic vitality of every region.

The time for change has come .  Let’s move the discussion forward.