Former Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice
Stanley Feldman has penned an op-ed in the Arizona Daily Star urging
voters to vote no on Prop. 123. Stanley Feldman: Vote NO on Prop. 123:
Proposition 123 may sound like a good deal, but it’s not. In
fact, almost all of Proposition 123’s supporters concede it’s a bad deal, and
here are some reasons why:
1. Prop. 123 only pays about
70 percent of the amount the courts have already ruled is due the schools under
Prop. 301, which the voters passed in 2000.
2. Of the future funding
contemplated by Proposition 123, about two-thirds will come from the Arizona
State Land Trust Fund that Congress established when Arizona became a state.
Approximately 2½ percent of the annual earnings from trust land sales or
rentals is paid to schools each year.
But Prop. 123 increases that
to over 6 percent per year, thus depleting trust principal and depriving future
generations of the security provided by the trust. It is truly a case of
robbing Peter to pay Peter — using the schools’ money to pay the debt owed the
schools.
3. Prop. 123 contains a
number of so-called triggers enabling a future legislature to renege on its
obligation to make future appropriations contemplated by Prop. 123.
The current legislative
majority reneged on Prop. 301, which is how we got to this point, so who can
say that future legislatures would not be as willing to violate the public
trust?
4. Prop. 123 will not provide
enough money to fix the underfunding problems created by our past and present
legislatures. Its supports call it only the “first step.”
5. Prop. 123 may well violate
the congressional act that enabled Arizona to become a state and that created
the trust.
6. The state presently has an
almost $1 billion budget surplus. If the Legislature and the governor want to
fix our schools, they could and should give some of that to the schools right
now.
7. Neither the governor nor
the Legislature has bothered to tell us what they are going to do after we take
the “first step” by passing Prop. 123. Gov. Doug Ducey has said that he’ll
worry about that after it passes.
He has also said, and the
2016-17 budget contemplates, an approximately $30 million tax cut for next
year. The governor has also pledged to never raise taxes. Where is the future
money going to come from? Another raid on the trust fund?
Almost all of Prop. 123’s
proponents concede that, standing alone, it is a bad deal and will not provide
enough money to schools. But, they argue, it is a “first step,” and future
legislatures will go forward to appropriate needed funding.
What possible basis is there
to believe that a legislative majority and administration that have starved the
schools in the past will experience some sort of epiphany and reverse course?
Given the position of the
Governor and current legislative majority, any hope that they will cure the
problem is pure fantasy. We need to do a lot better, and we need to do it the
way Arizona’s founders envisioned for our schools.
Let’s follow through with
what the taxpayers ordered in 2000 with Prop. 301 and fight it out in the
courts, which have already held that the Legislature must obey Prop. 301.
Let’s not indulge in this
fantasy that the current legislative majority and the Governor will do what is
necessary to solve the problem.
If they were willing to do
that, they would have done what they were commanded to do in Prop. 301 or could
have allocated some of the current $1 billion surplus for our schools.
Vote ‘no’ on 123.
