March 29, 2010 11:53 PM UTC

Gardner's All-Purpose "Rainy Day Fund" Excuse

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• by: Colorado Pols

Fascinating article in the Sterling Journal-Advocate this weekend:

The House this week approved HB 1369, the school finance act, but it was a vote that brought some legislators to tears.

HB 1369 cuts $365 million in state funding for school districts statewide. According to the bill’s fiscal note, which explains the impact, the cut will result in a 6 percent drop in state funding for every school district in the state for 2010-11, and according to legislators, many districts will see even larger reductions. Rep. Cory Gardner, R-Yuma, noted this week that the Agate School District is planning for a 12 percent cut. Legislators have warned that the cut in funding will result in the loss of 5,000 teacher jobs statewide.

HB 1369 was approved on a 48-17 vote on March 22. It is now on its way through the Senate; the Senate Education Committee on March 25 voted to send it on to Senate Appropriations for further action…

“This is the bottom of the well and we will be back next year doing the same thing,” said Rep. Tom Massey, R-Poncha Springs. “This is real money to our school districts. We’re at the point where the money we’re taking away will affect performance, the ability to graduate kids, cuts to real programs.”

Rep. Jerry Sonnenberg, R-Sterling, was one of the 48 lawmakers who voted in favor of HB 1369. He said this week that education should be a priority for the state, even though it is not funded where most would like this year.

Rep. Cory Gardner voted against it, saying the cuts should come from somewhere else. He noted that in 2006 he sponsored a bill to create a rainy day fund for the state; had that bill been approved, he said, the state would have had a $1.8 billion fund from which to cover the budget cuts. The legislature also could cut duplicative programs or enact across-the-board budget cuts that would take the place of the cuts.

“We need to prioritize,” he said.

Gardner’s “no” vote on HB 1369 puts him on the wish list for legislators who want to ask voters in November for the authority to raise taxes for K-12 and higher education.

Obvious question on Gardner’s 2006 “rainy day fund,” that he claims would have provided some “$1.8 billion” with which to address present shortfalls–this “coulda woulda shoulda” argument has been used a lot by Republicans this legislative session, to justify voting against all kinds of budget cuts. Given that the state has been making painful cuts for the last two fiscal years, and barely meeting essential obligations prior to that, where would this “rainy day fund” money have come from? After a little homework, we’ve come up with two possibilities. Gardner could be referring to a plan from 2006 to securitize tobacco funds–we’ve run some numbers and come up with, assuming nobody touched any of that money between then and now (a virtual impossibility), a maximum of $480 million or so that this fund might have had in it by FY ’11–less than a third of Gardner’s figure.

The other possibility, which we think is the one Gardner is talking about, was HCR06-1002–a failed referred measure sponsored by Gardner and then-Rep. Josh Penry. This bill would have, subject to voter approval, allocated Referendum C revenue–which Gardner fiercely opposed, and recently denounced as a “TABOR blowout”–into the aforementioned rainy-day fund. We can’t vouch for the “$1.8 billion” figure under this scenario either, but we do know that Referendum C revenue did not ultimately live up to projections due to the ensuing recession.

Either way, it seems to us that you shouldn’t be able to freely jump back and forth between opposing arguments, picking and choosing to frame the issue of the day, paying no attention to whether what you’re saying today contradicts what you said yesterday. And if you’ve staked your claim to higher office on a platform of having opposed Referendum C as pure evil, you can’t turn around and hide behind the very same Referendum C money, no matter what you would have “done differently” with it. The taxpayers still wouldn’t have gotten it back, would they?