The governor s it a freeze vetoed the K12 Education budget bill…

In his letter vetoing the Republican K-12 budget, Dayton criticized the bill’s “freezing of compensatory revenue.” The state doles out that money, sometimes more than $400 million a year, based on the number of poor students in each school district.

If you suspect that the Dayton administration’s responses to every GOP initiative were written last December, here’s your evidence:

But there’s one problem. Dayton and the Republicans both want spend the same amount on compensatory revenue over the next two years. Each side proposes leaving it at levels set in current law.

Senate Republicans once proposed freezing compensatory revenue, but that provision was eliminated when lawmakers crafted the final version of the K-12 bill (known as the “conference report”).

What Republicans did instead was separate the compensatory revenue from the basic per-pupil formula allowance. That means future Legislatures will have to specifically increase the compensatory revenue formula, rather than just boosting the basic formula.

In other words, they took it off the “autopilot” that drives so much of our biennial budget discussion.  The autopilot that drives up proposed spending, leading to “$5 billion deficits” and 20-odd percent spending hikes in every budget, and that legislatures will have to do their jobs.

Is that a freeze?

“How on God’s green earth do you argue that it’s a freeze?” said Rep. Pat Garofalo, R-Farmington, the Republican sponsor of the bill. He noted that not only have Dayton and the GOP both left the formula at current law levels, but spending will also increase automatically if there are more poor students.

The Administration let out a rare honest emission:

At first, Department of Education spokeswoman Charlene Briner agreed the letter got it wrong.

“It is incorrect to say that compensatory was frozen in the conference report,” Briner said in an interview. Soon after, Briner sent Hot Dish e-mails backtracking that statement and adding  “I think I was incorrect to say that.”

“The net effect is a freeze,” she wrote, “unless future legislatures act.” In other words, delinking it from the basic formula could mean future legislatures choose not to increase the compensatory revenue formula.

What?  Requiring that spending be justified?  The nerve of those peasants!

Dayton spokeswoman Katie Tinucci said they stand by the veto letter. “It is our interpretation that the effect of delinking compensatory revenue is the same as freezing it—we cannot rely on the actions of future legislatures.”

In other words – “spending is the goal; shut up and pay up”.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, June 10th, 2011 at 5:46 am and is filed under The Incredible Shrinking Governor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.