Laptops for smokes

The rapidly evolving state budget got a breather this weekend and lawmakers got a couple of days to recover from their extreme budget exertions of the last few days, leaving a persistent and unfortunate feature in the latest proposals that would demolish Maine’s technology endowment (Senate) or merely eviscerate it (House). Either choice would be a significant mistake.

The conflict in the budget is over $75 million. There are a dozen differences between the budgets backed by the House and Senate, including a meals tax in the House, a half dozen new programs (all worthy) in the Senate and a question over the timing of closing state liquor stores. But the largest disagreement is between preserving the $50 million in the technology fund or raising taxes on cigarettes by 26 cents to meet budget obligations. That is, as Gov. Angus King pointed out Friday, computers for schools or cheaper cigarettes.

From the simplest standpoint, the endowment that would provide the latest learning technology to all Maine schools is a one-time funding source being asked in the Senate proposal to fund on-going programs. If the money is spent elsewhere in the next budget, lawmakers cannot go back and get more money to keep those programs going. The cupboard will be bare. That is, computers for schools or cheaper cigarettes for only two years.

On a more complex level, the feeding on the endowment is about a broken trust. When the governor last year proposed the endowment to supply laptops to every seventh-grader, the idea was embraced by a few and despised by the many, including the many in the Legislature. It took heavy politicking just to persuade lawmakers to form a commission to study the idea. But when they did, when they saw the opportunities for learning that were presented, when they looked at what other states were doing, heard from business leaders who knew where their businesses were going, when they listened to students describe how they have used their laptops to tap into courses and materials unaffordable for their local school districts, an epiphany took place. Yes, their task force concluded, the laptop endowment is badly needed, and then, working through the summer and fall, proceeded to improve it, finding better technology and a better way to keep track of the machines.

The task force presented its final report to the Legislature just two months ago and lawmakers responded with testimonials on how they had been converted to the cause. Now, by voting to kill the endowment without so much as a single public hearing after it took dozens of public-comment sessions to create the fund in its current form, lawmakers are saying that public input counts for little or nothing. They are telling potential private supporters of the endowment that the fund might be there in more than name next year or it might not. Maine has no chance of raising private funds that way.

But what makes the legislative flip-flop on this program especially hard to take is what has happened since Gov. King proposed the endowment. Maine was out front for about a week, but other places were racing along the same course. One-on-one, daily access to computers is reality for students as young as the fourth grade in counties in Iowa and Georgia, in New York City, in entire provinces in Australia, throughout Taiwan. A Virginia County with the same population of all of Maine approved a laptop plan last week, and the federal government is looking to expand its own programs. Maine hasn’t any chance of leading anymore; now the question is whether it will fall behind.

Before the Senate voted to kill the technology endowment, it proclaimed that the best way to fund state government was through the Rainy Day Fund, the state’s savings account. It’s the kind of decision that makes bond houses – the places where people objectively rate state fiscal prudence – wince. Top-rated states simply don’t budget that way, and if Maine wants to get to that top rank someday, it can’t either.

Apparently, senators figured that out, too, and soon backed off their plan. But rather than go back to work with the Appropriations Committee or the governor’s office, Senate leaders brought another budget to a vote, this time going after the technology fund. But it’s the same bad budgeting as their Rainy Day raid. It’s trading computers in schools for two years of cheaper cigarettes, and it smells bad.