THE WAY TO REFORM

It is unfair that a new governor handed a billion-dollar shortfall – one that unsurprisingly turns out to be closer to $1.4 billion – also must confront an immensely popular referendum that would significantly shift school funding from local to state responsibility. But such a measure has attracted a record number of signatures and is the expression of a frustrated citizenry tired of a decade of inaction by lawmakers. The measure would pass if presented in November, almost certainly all of the steps it requires are needed soon anyway and the legislative history of Maine suggests that crises and deadlines may be the best time to accomplish reform.

The referendum question, crafted by the Maine Municipal Association, attracted 98,000 signatures on the last Election Day, possibly a record and undoubtedly a strong expression of citizen support. The initiative would require the Legislature to raise the state’s support of K-12 education from 44 percent to 55 percent of the total; create cash incentives for schools and municipalities to save money through increased cooperation; and direct state lawmakers to develop a plan to lower the state’s tax burden. Funding for special education, a rapidly growing expense made worse by the federal government’s failure to match its mandates with funding, would be the sole responsibility of the state.

Gov. John Baldacci already has outlined some of his plans to make government more efficient while lowering the tax burden, and he has expressed his commitment to funding local education and discussed the need for greater regional cooperation. His ideas and the directives within the initiative match, and while the initiative might not set the same schedule contemplated by the governor or the many legislators who have supported these measures, the public support behind the initiative adds to the mandate for these changes.

The school-funding component would shift $200 million under the current school budget from property to income and sales taxes, and will receive the most attention in the campaign to pass the initiative. But its other components – the incentives for communities to work together in schools and municipal government, the insistence on a plan to reduce the overall tax burden in Maine – are equally important if for no other reason than they announce the support of the municipalities, through the MMA, to carry out reform long overdue.

Unlike oversimple measures that simply demand immediate tax cuts, this initiative gives lawmakers both a direction and room to make sensible policy. It sets hard deadlines but realistic ones.

It respects the fact that state lawmakers can improve the overall proposal within its broad outline. Certainly, legislators would want to undertake this measure in the context of wider tax reform and they properly will count on school districts and municipalities to use money set aside through the initiative to find specific areas of cooperation and savings that so far have eluded Maine.

Too often good ideas get buried by small numbers of interest groups that begin an avalanche of exemptions and smother reforms. The initiative keeps the reform moving; it sets Maine on a course it knows it must take. Legislators could save considerable time and pass the measure during the legislative session, rather than sending it out as a referendum question that would surely succeed. And then, with broad public support, they could get moving on long overdue tax reform.