In response to the governor’s State of the State speech earlier this week and his touting the tax-relief plan passed by the Legislature, Senate GOP leader Paul Davis said he was unimpressed. “In fact, I’ve got some people in my district who will actually be getting a tax increase and that’s unacceptable in our minds if you’re trying to provide tax relief.”

That may be so, but not solely because of the work by the tax-relief panel. A program change approved a couple of years ago by both Republicans and Democrats is also responsible.

The change is the school funding model, Essential Programs and Services, which aims to deliver adequate education funding to children statewide. Districts with low mill-rate efforts or with falling enrollments will not find the EPS model kind to them. The fact that lawmakers chose to reach the state’s 55 percent share over four years, rather than two, makes the transition time particularly hard.

Two things to keep in mind, how-ever: The tax cut is involved in this only tangentially – it includes mov-ing toward the 55 percent state share, but it doesn’t cause some taxes to rise. EPS does that.

Second, in many cases, the old school formula would have treated these towns even more harshly, depending on how well the formula was funded.

The Legislature supported the change from the cost-plus style of the old funding model to the EPS model because the new one is grounded in equity. It asks what opportunities should go into an education as defined by what could come out of it – successful completion of the Learning Results. Lawmakers further decided what level of effort towns should make toward paying for this education.

Towns without high property valuations that had been making a relatively low effort may find they were putting in less than the lawmakers expected. Declining enrollments means declining state funds; the combination of both these conditions is painful, and could drive policy decisions toward consolidation at the local level.

If the select tax committee had had an extra $250 million in state revenue, it could have helped this situation by moving Maine faster toward full funding of EPS. It didn’t, and maybe that is a failure of imagination on its part, but there weren’t any good ideas from other places to find that money either.