Our View: Arizona lawmakers avoid middle ground on education funding

• Negotiations over a state debt to public education ended in an impasse on Tuesday
• Instead, GOP legislative leaders announced a complex plan for hiking school funding
• Our Republican lawmakers will do anything, at the expense of common sense, to avoid hiking taxes

The impasse in settlement negotiations over a legislative debt to public education may be discouraging, but it hardly comes as a surprise.

The Legislature owes public K-12 education in Arizona an extra $331 million a year, as directed by voters in Proposition 301. Educators also argue the state owes schools at least $1.3 billion in back payments.

Negotiations ended Tuesday when the plaintiffs, a group of school districts and education groups, declared the parties could not come to an agreement. Exactly where the impasse arises isn’t clear, as both sides remain under a gag order.

But, let’s be honest. It is not hard to guess why anyone seeking funding would run into a brick wall with the Arizona Legislature, which will increase taxes to meet its obligations only after pigs fly. And even then, only with a court order.

Still, Republican legislative leaders departed the courtroom Tuesday and immediately announced a plan they said would direct an additional $500 million a year for 10 years to K-12 education.

They called it a plan. But any “plan” that hangs on voters approving two ballot measures is more of a wish or a hope.

As set out by Senate President Andy Biggs, R-Gilbert, the idea has four parts.

•It would continue the $74 million per year funding increase approved by lawmakers this year. To that it would add 1.6 percent annually for inflation.

•It would add $100 million each year (again, plus 1.6 percent for inflation) from last year’s higher than anticipated state revenues.

•It would adapt Gov. Doug Ducey’s proposal to increase the percentage of revenue directed to education from the state land trust’s permanent fund, pending voter approval and (according to some legal experts) perhaps congressional approval.

•It would include an unspecified amount from the First Things First fund, which was created by voters in 2006, thus requiring voter approval to redirect any part of the roughly $125 million the program gets in tobacco-settlement funds each year.

That’s a lot of hoop-jumping.

Especially since the Great Recession, we often have marveled at the capacity of the Legislature to creatively fashion new revenue or redirect old sources to new uses, all in service of maintaining its reputation as a no-tax-increase-ever body of lawmakers.

It is a dubious reputation. “Selling” state buildings accumulates debt via rent payments to the new owners, depriving taxpayers of any real benefit from the funds now directed to the state’s landlords. That may not be a tax, per se, but it has the same effect.

Ditto cutting back on money going to cities and counties. The county and municipal governments short-changed by the Legislature must choose between cutting services or raising taxes because of those cuts — another de facto tax hike whose sole benefit is letting Republican lawmakers pretend they weren’t the ones responsible.

It would be a lot simpler if GOP state leaders would just face the issue head on. But, sigh, no. Instead, we have an impasse in negotiations over a debt the state clearly owes, and the certainty of still more lawyer bills.

In fairness to Biggs and his co-sponsor, House Speaker David Gowan, R-Sierra Vista, the Democratic alternative is not much better. House Minority Leader Eric Meyer, D-Paradise Valley, would see the state pay its education tab this year by draining the rainy-day fund. And where would money come from for the second year?

Between the two, however, the prospect for compromise remains. Or should. Whether Biggs, Gowan, Meyer, et al, are willing to find that elusive middle ground is another matter entirely.