{"id":17332,"date":"2017-04-26T00:07:52","date_gmt":"2017-04-26T06:07:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=17332"},"modified":"2017-04-26T00:07:52","modified_gmt":"2017-04-26T06:07:52","slug":"what-do-those-mill-levies-really-pay-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2017\/04\/what-do-those-mill-levies-really-pay-for\/","title":{"rendered":"What do those mill levies really pay for?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"DC\"<\/a>

David Crisp<\/p><\/div>\n

The mail-in ballot for the School District 2 mill levy election is burning a hole in my table, crying out for a decision. Election day is May 2.<\/p>\n

The school district wants to raise my taxes about $30 a year in order to buy new textbooks, increase programs at the Career Center and hire more staff to reduce class sizes and provide additional help to advanced and to struggling students. That\u2019s just the kind of stuff schools ought to be doing, but still \u2026 .<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy enough to find the cheerleaders for school spending\u2014I need look no farther than the front yard, where my wife\u2019s new landscaping includes a sign reading \u201cGreat Communities Support Great Schools: Vote Yes!\u201d<\/p>\n

But she\u2019s a retired teacher, and a mill levy that can\u2019t draw support from retired teachers isn\u2019t going to win anybody\u2019s vote. Getting a handle on what mill levy opponents think is much harder. Typically they don\u2019t organize campaigns, put up signs or buy ads. But they turn out, year after year, to vote against school levies, and they often succeed.<\/p>\n

Given that virtually nobody argues that educating children is a bad idea, what exactly are opponents thinking? A letter to the editor in Sunday\u2019s Billings Gazette made the case that I have most often heard over the years: My property tax bill, the letter writer said, was not quite $1,200 a year back in 1999-2000. Now it is more than $1,900.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe point is this; we have not seen the increases translate to, say, 65-70 percent improvement in the school system,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI would encourage anyone to vote no, now and forever on this unfair tax.\u201d<\/p>\n

As it happens, the letter writer has a house that must look a lot like mine. Our property taxes were $1,215 in 2000. In 2016, they were $2,083. So let\u2019s take a closer look at those numbers, granting that not all of it goes to schools.<\/p>\n

First, thanks to the magic of the internet, it\u2019s easy these days to take inflation into account. Online calculators vary slightly, but basically it would cost about $1,755 this year to buy the same education that $1,200 would buy in 2000. In real dollars, my tax bill hasn\u2019t gone up by more than $800; it\u2019s gone up $328.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>Still, $328 in 16 years is real money. For cheapskates like us, it\u2019s a decent restaurant meal once a year, if we stick to drinking water.<\/p>\n

But the basic inflation rate doesn\u2019t tell the whole story. Precise numbers are surprisingly hard to nail down, but enrollment in School District 2 appears to have increased<\/a> by about a thousand students<\/a> since 2000. The district projects<\/a> that high school enrollment alone will increase by another 900 students by 2024.<\/p>\n

Besides that, medical costs, for example, rise faster than the rate of inflation<\/a> just about every year. And school districts spend an awful lot of money on medical insurance\u2014about $700 per month<\/a> per employee for those on the cheap plan in School District 2.<\/p>\n

A gallon of gasoline<\/a> cost $1.39 in 1999, about a buck less than now. As that letter writer no doubt knows, gasoline cost far more just a few years ago, and school districts can\u2019t do much to save on gasoline when they are providing bus rides to thousands of kids every day.<\/p>\n

Those textbooks the school district wants? The price of college textbooks<\/a> has increased at triple the rate of inflation over the last dozen or so years. Since school districts buy books in bulk, they have more bargaining power, but costs of up to $80 or $100 are not unusual even for elementary school texts.<\/p>\n

You know what else has grown faster than inflation? Property values. Our house is valued at nearly three times what it was when we bought it in 1992. Just because our house is worth three times as much doesn\u2019t mean we have three times as much money, but that\u2019s how property taxes work. You can\u2019t blame the school district for that.<\/p>\n

The year 1999 had a few other peculiarities. It came near the end of a bad stretch for Montana teachers. In 1990, they were making<\/a> 88 percent of the national average for teacher salaries. By 1999, the percentage had fallen to 76. Somewhere along the way, there had to be some catch-up money.<\/p>\n

That year also was just about the time that computer use in schools nationwide was really taking off. It\u2019s fair and fun to argue about how much good all those computers have done, but there was no avoiding them, and they cost a lot more than a few pencils in a cigar box.<\/p>\n

Then, of course, there was the Great Recession of 2008. State funding for schools in Montana fell 4.3 percent<\/a> in real dollars between 2008 and 2014. School District 2 last passed an elementary school levy in 2013 and a high school levy in 2007, so not all of that pain has washed away.<\/p>\n

The state of Montana also pays only about half the national average<\/a> for school construction and renovations. The deferred maintenance list just keeps getting longer.<\/p>\n

Yeah, Billings schools probably are not 70 percent better than they were in 2000. But they might be a little better. Recent test scores<\/a> indicate that Billings students consistently perform better than the national average on standardized tests.<\/p>\n

None of that is to say you should go out and vote for the mill levies. For years, I voted for every one of them, almost unconsciously. After the 2002 teachers\u2019 strike, I started paying attention.<\/p>\n

I know how hard it is to vote to increase your own taxes when average wage increases have been mired near zero for a couple of decades. But if we are ever going to crawl out of that low-wage muck, we will have to get smarter. Those schools might be our best chance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The mail-in ballot for the School District 2 mill levy election is burning a hole in my table, crying out for a decision. Election day is May 2.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":13405,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3864],"tags":[4454,513],"class_list":["post-17332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-mill-levy","tag-school-district-2","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17332"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17335,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17332\/revisions\/17335"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}