Gov. John Baldacci opposes the November referendum question that demands the state pay an added $260 million annually for schools to relieve the burden on local taxes. Unaffordable, he says, and suggests instead a plan that would add some $200 million. The difference between the two figures matters in a $5 billion budget, but it doesn’t matter much.

The Maine Municipal Association devised the ballot question, which demands the state pay 55 percent of the total state and local cost of K-12 education, including all of the special education mandated costs. This would shift $260 million from property taxes to state taxes, although MMA erred in not more specifically identifying how it expected the state to fund this shift. The plan would fulfill a 1985 school funding goal, which the state has never met.

The governor has called lawmakers back into session during the third week of August to consider his alternative plan, which would compete on the ballot against the MMA proposal. He would meet the 55 percent goal over five years and set a cap on municipal spending. How this cap would work is not clear. How the governor would meet the 55 percent level five years from now, as measured by the new Essential Programs and Services model for school funding, also is not clear. The fact that his and the MMA proposals are so similar suggests that these are not so much competing measures as questions about timing.

For instance, Gov. Baldacci’s tax-cap plan sounds dramatic, but the MMA proposal had anticipated similar savings and, if passed, instructs the Legislature to write “legislation that consists of a comprehensive plan that integrates the efforts of state, county and local governments and schools to reduce unnecessary spending, identifies cost savings in the delivery of governmental services and otherwise addresses the issues of the overall tax burden in this state.” Certainly a tax cap, if needed, would be consistent with the language in the MMA bill.

Maine does not need a prolonged fight over two similar plans, nor is it an efficient use of government to create such a fight. If what matters to the administration is timing, then its question to voters should ask whether they would support beginning the MMA plan no later than, say, Jan. 1, 2009. If lawmakers have significantly different ideas about how to take the burden off the property tax, they should offer them soon.