The (Grand Junction) Daily Sentinel, Feb. 14, on the Interior Department’s plan for national parks:
If Western communities seem obsessed with the policies and budget priorities of the U.S. Department of the Interior, it’s with good reason.
Interior has its fingerprints all over local economies near public lands. From mineral development and grazing to outdoor recreation and Payments in Lieu of Taxes, the department shapes economic conditions in the rural West in a way that few folks east of the Mississippi can understand or appreciate.
Mesa County, with a huge amount of federally managed land and a National Park Service property to boot, is disproportionately affected by Interior’s moves.
There’s plenty to like in Secretary Ryan Zinke’s proposed $11.7 billion budget proposal, especially a legislative proposal to establish a Public Lands Infrastructure Fund, which would provide up to $18 billion to address a backlog of deferred maintenance in national parks, national wildlife refuges and Bureau of Indian Education schools.
“Our parks and refuges are being loved to death,” Zinke said in a press release. Our own Colorado National Monument has a deferred-maintenance backlog in excess of $20 million. Anything that can spruce up our area’s biggest attraction would be a welcome change from years of underfunding the National Park Service.
But there’s a rub here. There always is. Interior’s proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2019 represents a 16 percent reduction over the previous year and a 7 percent overall cut to the National Park Service. Funding for NPS operations remains flat and the budget proposes cuts to cultural programs, land acquisition and a grant program that leverages philanthropic giving. The special fund to tackle deferred park maintenance would come from energy leasing revenues.
The proposition of opening up more land and waters for oil and gas development to rebuild the National Park System naturally rubs conservation groups the wrong way. It’s like tying funding for a healthy eating initiative to fast food sales.
Much of what Zinke’s budget attempts to do sounds good. It “enables Interior to carry out its core mission of responsible multiple-use of public lands in a way that both conserves America’s iconic landscapes and supports responsible resource development,” according to Interior’s press shop.
But as we learned long ago, “responsible” is in the eye of the beholder.
We would prefer that the National Park Service not have to endure cuts at the same time it’s being promised money to fix longtime problems. But we’re reminded that Congress has painted itself into a corner on nearly all budget matters. If the money for the repair backlog wasn’t coming from energy revenues, where would it come from? More debt-financed budget deals?
Editorial: http://bit.ly/2HgIClg
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The Denver Post, Feb. 13, on equitable funding for Colorado schools:
Colorado’s school superintendents are sending up a smoke signal asking for help, and everyone across the state should be listening.
Not only are Colorado schools underfunded, a majority of superintendents are saying, but the way the state distributes billions of dollars in funding is inequitable and based on a broken formula that was put in place 24 years ago.
More than 170 superintendents are backing a bill at the Colorado Capitol that would completely reconfigure how school districts are funded, placing more emphasis on the attributes of students in the district than on the district itself to determine per-pupil state funding levels. House Bill 1232 is sponsored by Rep. Dave Young and Sen. Andy Kerr, both Democrats, and Sen. Don Coram, a Republican.
The catch is that even if the legislation for a new school funding formula is passed into law this year, it won’t take effect unless voters approve a tax increase of somewhere around $1.6 billion for schools, although that number is subject to change as non-partisan staff at the Capitol completes its fiscal impact analysis.
That money would accomplish two goals. First, it would hold school districts harmless to ensure the new formula doesn’t end up cutting funding to any single district. The new formula would create significant winners and losers without ensuring that base funding amount. Second, it would increase state funding to what it would be if lawmakers hadn’t shortchanged the Amendment 23-mandated funding levels with cuts that have come to be known as the negative factor.
“Even with this $1.6 billion that we need to be able to fund the formula, it doesn’t take us up to national average (of per-pupil funding),” said Wendy Rubin, superintendent of Englewood Public Schools. Superintendents, including Rubin, began the process two years ago of developing a plan to ensure schools are not only funded adequately, but that if state funding were increased, districts would also be funded equitably.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because it was also the premise behind Amendment 66 in 2013: pass legislation to reform Colorado’s broken school funding formula and then ask voters for a tax increase to fund the new formula. But when voters soundly rejected that $1 billion income tax hike, the funding formula reforms disappeared, too.
This editorial is not an endorsement of a tax hike - although we agree that Colorado schools are chronically underfunded and need additional resources to provide our kids with the education they need to compete in today’s economy. There are only vague proposals to put something on the ballot this fall that would increase school funding. But rather this is an endorsement of the first step in fixing the problem, passing a new funding formula to begin to address some of the inequities in how Colorado schools are funded.
A student’s ZIP code should not determine the quality of their education, and unfortunately, the current formula has created an inequitable system that has enabled just that to be the case.
The proposed formula would ensure districts receive more funding if they are serving students living in poverty, or those learning English as a second language, or gifted and talented students. Rural and small school districts would get more reasonable funding levels, given the diminished economies of scale they face. Additionally, the formula would for the first time fund kindergarten students for a full day, and change the preschool funding formula so there are no caps on half-day enrollment numbers.
There’s much to like in this proposed formula, and lawmakers should take this bipartisan, superintendent-backed legislation seriously.
Editorial: http://dpo.st/2BuhRcP
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Aurora Sentinel, Feb. 13, on Colorado’s paid family leave act:
These things are all true: Almost everybody in Colorado must work when they grow up; with everybody working, a seriously sick family member can create a crisis; and a plan by Colorado Democratic state legislators to address the first two things is a big and dubious income tax hike.
A bevy of prominent state Democratic lawmakers, including Aurora’s state Sen. Rhonda Fields, have rallied to House Bill 18-1001, the “FAMLI” Medical Leave Insurance Program. The measure would impose an income tax increase on everyone in the state, couched as a “premium,” to get around the state’s tax-increase laws. That income tax hike could be as high as about 1 percent, meaning that someone who makes $50,000 a year would pay an increase of $500 a year in wage “premiums” to the state.
That’s a chunk, and, yes, that’s a tax.
In exchange, everyone would be eligible for checks from the state for about two-thirds of their salary for up to 12 weeks if they had or adopted a baby, or if a family member were to take ill and needed care.
No one can successfully argue that a Scandinavian real-life social system is bad for anyone, businesses included. Even the churlish Trump Administration sees the wisdom of letting workers stay home with very sick children or spouses. The reality for most Americans is that sick leave, if they even have it as a benefit, evaporates long before a new-mother is ready to go back to work or the parent of a seriously ill child can even think of returning. And the worst part of reality for many Americans is that they don’t have the money in savings to do without a paycheck for two or three months until a home-crisis resolves.
We certainly would argue that the lack of paid family leave is a problem in Colorado, but HB 18-1001 is the wrong answer.
The least of its problems are how the system would be set up. It levies a tax, so it’s a tax. Proponents can call it anything they want, it’s likely that if this measure were to pass, critics would be successful persuading a court that it violates Colorado’s problematic Taxpayer Bill of Rights. That misguided measure requires tax increases like this one to be approved by voters.
The Aurora Sentinel argued for years in editorials that the controversial Colorado Medicaid Hospital Fee was a fee, not a tax. But this levy, imposed on every worker in the state, is a tax.
A bigger problem this measure has is the benefit itself. Let’s say you or your spouse has a baby, and you make $25,000 a year. You would pay about $250 a year for this “insurance” policy, about $21 a month. If you invoke the benefit, your stay-at-home-benefit would be about $288 a week for up to 12 weeks. Ask anyone making $25,000 a year, losing a third of their salary would be just as much a crisis as having a sick kid.
We agree that the most financially challenged Coloradans are the ones most vulnerable during a family crisis, but if you live in the Denver area, the FAMLI Act would be like giving someone in a sinking boat a Styrofoam coffee cup to bail water. You could certainly argue that it’s better than nothing, but those who do probably don’t have to try an live on two-thirds of $25,000 a year, and they don’t consider the biggest problem the FAMLI Act causes: what we would give up to get it.
Finally, employers would get a bye on paying for this service and would arguably be huge beneficiaries. Well-cared for employees undoubtedly add to every businesses’ bottom line. The Scandinavian safety-net system has proven that repeatedly. Businesses should pay, too.
A 1-percent income tax increase, or fee, is serious. The chances would be almost certain that if this were to pass, there would never be another income tax hike in Colorado, at least not one like this, which affects everyone in the state.
Paid family leave is important, but it’s even more unnerving that Colorado and the nation are barreling toward a health care system catastrophe. Within a very few years, and possibly within just a few months, the cost of increasingly useless health insurance will rocket as the Trump Administration and Republicans in Congress cut the legs out from under the Affordable Care Act. If Republicans prevail in keeping both houses in Congress this fall, it will almost certainly mean the end of expanded Medicaid and a spiraling down of an already dismal health care system.
As the nation’s health insurance and health care systems reel, Colorado may have to go it alone to emulate the Affordable Care Act. To do that, taxing room against employee paychecks, either through a “premium,” a “fee” or an honest tax, will be necessary.
While both paid family leave and affordable health care are both critical, the widespread loss of health insurance across the state would be so catastrophic that the need for paid-leave would pale in comparison.
Instead, lawmakers could require the state’s insurance division to create FAMLI-like family leave policies for employees making less than $50,000 a year. Give businesses tax breaks for purchasing these policies and additional incentives for employees to help pay part of the premiums.
Lawmakers should not, however, set up a system that will cost Colorado taxpayers millions to fight for - against tax-protesters - in court, a system that would preclude an income tax hike that will probably be needed soon for a public benefit even critical than paid family leave.
Editorial: http://bit.ly/2Eo8SIN
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