Never Mind
Remember all the hand-wringing earlier this year among Irvine School officials over a projected $4 million shortfall for the school year just begun? A campaign was waged, for the fourth time, to persuade the city’s voters to raise property taxes. The measure failed by a hair’s breadth of mustering the required two-thirds voter approval, prompting Donald Bren and the Irvine water district to pledge their foundations’ money to make up the predicted deficit.
But guess what? It turns out that Bren needn’t have ridden to the rescue, because the booming state economy did. Like school districts around the state, Irvine wound up getting more for this school year than it expected,$11 million more in Irvine’s case. Instead of dealing with a shortfall, Irvine school officials were debating last week how to spend a surplus.
Last year’s school budget was $137 million. Voters were warned it would go down by $4 million in this new school year if the tax failed. The tax did fail, but this year’s budget wound up growing by 9% to $149 million,up $12 million, not down $4 million.
Now, even before this good news arrived, Irvine schools were making do. They squeezed $2.1 million, or 1.5%, out of last year’s budget largely through job attrition and borrowed $3.4 million from a building maintenance fund. Now, figure in the $11 million windfall from the state and $2.2 million from the foundations, (The foundations have decided that the Irvine schools right now don’t need the full $4 million previously pledged for operations, although Don Bren kicked in another $25 million in foundation funds last week for special programs). Add it all up, and the district sure as heck can live without the extra $3 million it wanted from taxpayers.
Further, given the steps that were taken by the district itself and its benefactors to head off a shortfall after the tax-hike rejection, it’s now clear that even if the shortfall had come to pass, asking for a tax increase last spring was at least one year premature. Moreover, there’s been a change in fiscal management at the Irvine schools this year that has been widely seen as a case of taxpayer-induced necessity being the mother of invention.
This all might seem like unfair hindsight. But if the tax hike had succeeded, would taxpayers now be receiving a refund thanks to the subsequent windfall? Fat chance,just look at how easily the schools’ operating budget has expanded to accommodate the new revenue.
This is not to suggest that Irvine schools should not be adequately or even generously funded. The schools are among the best in the state, and a key part of what makes Irvine an attractive community to the technicians, professionals and other skilled workers who are fueling the economic boom.
Those who want taxpayers to shell out more to fund Irvine’s schools should emphasize this quality-of-life argument and soft-pedal the gloom-and-doom stuff. You know the one about the boy who cried wolf.
And this episode ought to give pause to the relentless critics of the two-thirds requirement for raising taxes. It worked like a charm in Irvine.
