Connolly's Pledge - No Tax Hike
Gerry Connolly, chairman of the Fairfax Board of Supervisors, has announced that he will not support any increase in the real estate tax rate for fiscal 2008. Connolly has warned department heads that the county's revenues are only expected to grow by three percent and that county spending cannot continue on its present trend.
A sincere effort to give taxpayers a break or election year politics? (All supervisors are up for election in 2007.) At this stage, I don't know how to judge Connolly. To his credit, county spending per se (as opposed to school spending) has generally not grown at rates that exceed the growth in population and inflation. This is not to agree, however, that there's no room for improvement on the county side. For example, Pay-for-Performance has resulted in excessive raises because a bell-shaped curve for evaluations has never been used.
But school spending continues to explode, even though overall enrollment has flattened. The supervisors have tried for years to have the schools keep increases to a target, but have generally failed in that task. Former superintendent Domenech believed that it was his job to get as much money for the schools as possible, but did not care much for how he spent it. Our current school chief, Jack Dale, seems to have a better understanding that the money belongs to taxpayers, but he still spends more than the supervisors' target. Last year, the supervisors gave then school board head I. Moon a tough questioning at the county budget hearing. Mr. Moon did not seem to understand the problem of limited resources as well as he should have.
How will Mr. Dale and his staff respond? Will they look for ways to reduce non-instructional costs? Last time I looked, FCPS had at least 200 curriculum specialists. The schools have also resisted contracting out support and administrative services. (Must keep those labor unions happy.) What about measuring programs' results? Will the schools ever propose eliminating a program that does not seem to be producing results? Or will they pull something from Domenech's bag of dirty tricks in order to retain big funding increases? Mr. Domenech, to his discredit, would regularly circulate a list of popular programs (e.g., ROTC, language immersion, GT) that would absolutely need to be eliminated if he did not receive all the funding that he demanded. One would hope that Jack Dale will first look at overhead.
In addition, FCPS should develop a baseline budget that shows what would be required to meet, but not exceed, any state and federal mandates. Then the budget should show various costs to exceed those requirements by specific increments, along with the expected results for deploying the additional resources. For example, if the state sets a maximum class size of 26 for a particular grade, what are the costs for compliance at that specific level? Then FCPS could show the additional costs and expected results to reduce class size to 25, 24, etc. Reducing class size to 25 would cost an additional $X and would produce an average 2% improvement on the SOLs. Reducing class size to 24 would cost $Y more and produce a 3% improvement on SOL scores. Etc.
I would not expect that everyone would agree where to draw the lines. As a parent of children in FCPS, I might want smaller class sizes than would some of my neighbors. But if FCPS would provide this type of budget detail, we all could debate costs and benefits as opposed to emotions. I suspect that consensus would develop around a spending plan that exceeded state standards somewhat. The final budget would probably exceed what the taxpayers' association would want, but be less than those parents who measure educational success solely by the amount of money spent. That would probably be a good and fair result. Moreover, we could then measure the results to see how what our added tax dollars produced.
Bottom line, if Gerry Connolly's pledge is to be kept, he needs the full cooperation of Jack Dale, his staff and the school board. Fortunately for all of us, Jack Dale is no Daniel Domenech. Dale is a reasonable person.
A sincere effort to give taxpayers a break or election year politics? (All supervisors are up for election in 2007.) At this stage, I don't know how to judge Connolly. To his credit, county spending per se (as opposed to school spending) has generally not grown at rates that exceed the growth in population and inflation. This is not to agree, however, that there's no room for improvement on the county side. For example, Pay-for-Performance has resulted in excessive raises because a bell-shaped curve for evaluations has never been used.
But school spending continues to explode, even though overall enrollment has flattened. The supervisors have tried for years to have the schools keep increases to a target, but have generally failed in that task. Former superintendent Domenech believed that it was his job to get as much money for the schools as possible, but did not care much for how he spent it. Our current school chief, Jack Dale, seems to have a better understanding that the money belongs to taxpayers, but he still spends more than the supervisors' target. Last year, the supervisors gave then school board head I. Moon a tough questioning at the county budget hearing. Mr. Moon did not seem to understand the problem of limited resources as well as he should have.
How will Mr. Dale and his staff respond? Will they look for ways to reduce non-instructional costs? Last time I looked, FCPS had at least 200 curriculum specialists. The schools have also resisted contracting out support and administrative services. (Must keep those labor unions happy.) What about measuring programs' results? Will the schools ever propose eliminating a program that does not seem to be producing results? Or will they pull something from Domenech's bag of dirty tricks in order to retain big funding increases? Mr. Domenech, to his discredit, would regularly circulate a list of popular programs (e.g., ROTC, language immersion, GT) that would absolutely need to be eliminated if he did not receive all the funding that he demanded. One would hope that Jack Dale will first look at overhead.
In addition, FCPS should develop a baseline budget that shows what would be required to meet, but not exceed, any state and federal mandates. Then the budget should show various costs to exceed those requirements by specific increments, along with the expected results for deploying the additional resources. For example, if the state sets a maximum class size of 26 for a particular grade, what are the costs for compliance at that specific level? Then FCPS could show the additional costs and expected results to reduce class size to 25, 24, etc. Reducing class size to 25 would cost an additional $X and would produce an average 2% improvement on the SOLs. Reducing class size to 24 would cost $Y more and produce a 3% improvement on SOL scores. Etc.
I would not expect that everyone would agree where to draw the lines. As a parent of children in FCPS, I might want smaller class sizes than would some of my neighbors. But if FCPS would provide this type of budget detail, we all could debate costs and benefits as opposed to emotions. I suspect that consensus would develop around a spending plan that exceeded state standards somewhat. The final budget would probably exceed what the taxpayers' association would want, but be less than those parents who measure educational success solely by the amount of money spent. That would probably be a good and fair result. Moreover, we could then measure the results to see how what our added tax dollars produced.
Bottom line, if Gerry Connolly's pledge is to be kept, he needs the full cooperation of Jack Dale, his staff and the school board. Fortunately for all of us, Jack Dale is no Daniel Domenech. Dale is a reasonable person.
posted by Toomanytaxes at 3:28 PM
1 Comments:
TOOMANYTAXES, I would like to hear your thoughts on major issues for the FCPS. I am a candidate (announcing soon) for School Board in 2007.
I've enjoyed reading your blog and would like to discuss your observations and ideas further. My email address is james AT jameslandrith DOT com.
Thank you.
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