The backers of a proposal to put an income tax hike on the 2018 ballot in order to raise money for Utah’s schools say they’re tired of waiting for lawmakers to act.
“We would welcome legislators to do it. They can do it more surgically and do it in a better way than a ballot initiative,” says former Utah House Speaker Nolan Karras. “We’ve been working for the last four or five years on this, but we just concluded that this is too big of a lift for the political folks, so we need to take it to the citizens.”
Karras was a guest on the “I Have Questions with Bryan Schott” podcast. If the “Our Schools Now” proposal passes, it could put an estimated $750 million annually into Utah’s public school system. That’s still nearly a half-billion dollars less than where Utah schools were a couple of decades ago according to a study by the Utah Foundation.
Karras says their proposal is just addressing the reality of Utah’s education system.
Lawmakers are wary of the Our Schools Now proposal, arguing that an income tax hike could hurt Utah’s economy. Instead, they want to find ways to get rid of some tax exemptions in order to boost funding for schools. Karras says that’s simply not enough.
“There’s no evil person here. There’s no villain. The legislature is not a villain. There’s just a lot of pressure. We think there needs to be a funding kick to take care of some of the things that need to be taken care of. We don’t see the will or the ability from the legislature or the governor to make those changes.”
Karras says Utah’s public school system is doing the best that they can with limited funding and classes bursting at the seams. But, the biggest problem facing Utah’s schools is something few people are talking about.
“We simply cannot keep qualified teachers in the classroom. 40% of them leave within the first five years. I was in a meeting where a teacher said the problem isn’t getting rid of bad teachers, the problem is you can’t keep the good ones.”
Karras stresses he sees the ballot initiative as the only path open to his group to make these changes because they don’t think lawmakers have the political will to do it.
“I’d rather take a beating than take this to the ballot because it’s going to be difficult and a hard sell. But, we don’t believe that the legislature or the governor has shown enough of a will to get it done, so it’s gotta be done outside of the process.”
Polling shows that 2/3rds of Utahns would support raising income taxes by 7/8th of 1 percent to fund schools. Karras says he believes those numbers, or he wouldn’t be part of the group trying to do just that.
“I am a great believer that we underestimate the intelligence of the voter. When they have the right information, they say yes. We’ve got to reinvent our educational system, you’ve gotta have better performance, and you can’t do that on a thin dime. You’re gonna have to fund education better and expect better results. Our proposal is, yes we want to fund, but we want better results.”
Our Schools Now is in the process of drafting their ballot proposal. Karras says they should be finished with that in April or May of this month. After that, the group has to hold hearings around the state, with the plan to start gathering signatures sometime in the spring of 2018.
For their part, Utah lawmakers say they’ll hold hearings during the 2017 session to make sure the Our Schools Now plan is fully vetted.
“I hope the legislators spend their time talking about what they’re going to do rather than criticize what others are going to do,” said Karras.
