Rell's Referendum Idea Could Be Revolutionary

Having proposed in her budget message two months ago to inflict a pay cut on most workers mainly so that the highest-paid teachers in the nation could continue to get the raises and benefit increases to which they have become accustomed despite Connecticut’s decline, Gov. Rell is seeking to compensate.

While two months ago she proposed to nullify the state Constitution’s limit on

state government’s spending, the governor now would put some modest limits on municipal spending. As a condition of the huge increases she proposes in state payments to municipal schools, the governor would prohibit municipalities from raising property taxes by more than 3 percent per year without getting the approval of townspeople at a referendum. Property tax increases have been averaging 6 percent per year, so 3 percent would be an improvement.

Further, the governor would modify the state’s binding arbitration law so that public employee union contract awards might be a little less generous.

The governor wants some of the new state money to be sent to towns to reduce property taxes, which have never been reduced despite Connecticut’s 30-year program of appropriating billions of dollars in the name of local property tax relief.

The governor’s plan won’t reduce property taxes either. But now she has put the tax-limit and accountability issues into play at last.

"Let’s get it done," the governor said in her budget address, and that is her slogan as she confronts and confounds the General Assembly. Exactly what does she mean by "done"?

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each town — but 50 percent reimbursement of the total of local educational costs across the state.)

• State assumption of what might be called the catastrophic costs of special education.

• Closing the gap in achievement between city students and students in the rest of the state.

• And enacting measures of accountability for school systems, including state takeover of failing systems.

While the 50-percent reimbursement level somehow has attained great moral status, the number has no magic. Yes, greater assumption by the state of school costs is generally desirable, especially with special education, since it is disgraceful to make any handicapped child the special burden of any particular community. But the reimbursement rate is only simple arithmetic. If Connecticut was really ready to trade local property tax revenue for state income and sales tax revenue or to replace local property taxes with a statewide property tax for schools,

and if the state was ready to limit school spending, it quickly could achieve any reimbursement rate it wanted, right up to 100 percent, without spending a cent more .

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any school accountability measures. For Connecticut long has done enough testing to know that school performance is almost entirely a matter of community demographics. After all, state government took over Hartford’s school system for more than five years, from 1997 through 2002, and changed nothing about student performance there, achieving only a few minor contract concessions from the city teachers union. (The legacy of the state takeover of Hartford’s schools may be only that the teachers lost medical insurance coverage for hair transplants.)

Hartford long has spent far more per pupil than most Connecticut school systems without result. Indeed, the concentration in Hartford and other cities of parentless children — unsupervised orphans, essentially — remains the cause of urban disintegration and, in turn, what is called suburban sprawl. School spending cannot change that.

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