DEFINING TABOR

Opponents of the Taxpayer Bill of Rights recently had a couple of lawyers explain that despite what TABOR’s authors might say, the ballot measure could force towns to cut their budgets – and therefore services – below the levels of the previous year. The citizen’s initiative may have been fairly considered that way once, but there is no reason for that now that the authors have described their intent.

If TABOR passes, it faces an immediate problem in trying to delegate to voters the ability to tax, an authority Maine’s constitution says the state’s Legislature may never surrender. With or without that change – perhaps a question better suited for the courts – lawmakers will be reviewing the initiative, and when they do, if legislative opponents are even halfway paying attention this summer, they will introduce further legislation that matches what the creators of TABOR say they want.

The Maine Heritage Policy Center was helpful with this in June. It offered a half dozen points of clarification on, for instance, how towns would calculate their spending growth and whether that growth could ever fall below zero. It describes how school budgets would be set and which schools would exist under separate budgeting rules depending on whether they were in school administrative units. (It will be interesting to see how this works under the constitution’s “suitable provision” language for education if a school budget were rejected by a public vote.)

What the public is hearing now is the range of interpretations of a complicated policy change, with supporters naturally offering the best possible view, and detractors, the worst. Without an extensive legislative record – a problem for almost any citizen’s initiative – this is inevitable. But at least for the Heritage Policy Center, some of the doubt can be dispelled and the necessary statutory language drafted before the vote even takes place.

This is important not just as a matter of good will but of economics. Voters this fall are going to see a variety of assessments on the effects of TABOR based on assumptions about its meaning. The more specifics the two sides can agree on, the better the economic assessments will be, giving voters a fairer chance to make up their minds.

With so much to argue about, the least supporters and opponents can do in this debate is get together long enough to agree on what the ballot question says.