[May 20, 2007]

The Morning Call, Allentown, Pa., Paul Carpenter column: After train wreck with Act 1, what will they do next?

(Morning Call, The (Allentown, PA) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) May 20--What's next?

Pennsylvania voters and local school boards do not seem eager to embrace the public education funding plans peddled from Harrisburg.

Rather than doing their duty as explicitly required by Article III of the Pennsylvania Constitution, members of the Legislature, in cahoots with the judicial and executive branches, tried to foist various forms of fraud on the public.

Pretending to address property tax reform, they concocted Act 50 of 1998, Act 72 of 2004 and Act 1 of 2006, along with a deluge of deception.

The treacheries of Act 1 came to a vote at the local level on Tuesday. Voters, in essence, told the Harrisburg establishment to drop dead. In virtually every school district, the taxing options required by Act 1 were on the ballot and were spectacularly rejected.

As reported in Thursday's Morning Call, the office of Gov. Ed Rendell said that was because of "a lack of understanding by the voters."

Perhaps voters did not understand all the intricacies of the Act 1 scheme, but they were able to smell a rat.

Perhaps some voters knew about Article III, which says it is the Legislature that has a duty to "provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of public education to serve the needs of the Commonwealth."

Perhaps voters understood it is not primarily the duty of local property tax systems, or local personal income taxes, or earned income taxes -- and it certainly is not the duty of a cockamamie network of casinos inspired by Bugsy Siegel.

Act 1 was ballyhooed as a measure to ease school property taxes by shifting the burden to local income taxes, in one form or another, with all sorts of strings attached but with absolutely no requirement for state politicians to put their craven fannies on the line by voting state funds up or down.

Act 1 came along because most school districts had snubbed the similarly bogus provisions of Act 72. Act 1 and the other Harrisburg hoaxes did nothing to correct the state's dereliction of its overall duty, or the state's currently meager funding system, with its disgraceful disparities.

I asked Michael Race, a spokesman for the state Department of Education, how recently the state had paid more than half the costs of public education. "It was in the mid-1970s," he told me.

Race also showed me how to find the state disbursements to each school district.

The most recent figures available, for the 2004-05 school year, show Allentown getting $3,605 from the state per student, while one district in Clearfield County gets $8,724, thanks to funding formulas that few comprehend. Parkland and Whitehall-Coplay each get less than $2,000.

The state's failure to fulfill its funding duty is one glitch; such disparities are another.

I am not always in sync with other opinion writers, but prior to Tuesday's voting, a Morning Call editorial referred to the "chicanery of Act 1," and a succession of op-ed columns called it "a pig in a poke," "an awful law," and "a cynical shell game."

So now, with the electoral train wreck that greeted Act 1 five days ago, what's next?

I am hopeful that the Harrisburg crowd will dredge up the courage to fulfill their constitutional mandates, to construct fair and simple state funding formulas, and to enact necessary revenue-raising measures.

At a minimum, there should be a shift that places at least two-thirds of the public education funding burden on the state, leaving local districts to decide how much extra money they want to invest in schools through property taxes, income taxes or whatever.

As for the promises that the Bugsy Siegel approach will save us with oodles of casino cash, forgive me if I don't hold my breath waiting for that.

paul.carpenter@mcall.com 610-820-6176

Copyright (c) 2007, The Morning Call, Allentown, Pa.
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