Two Newspaper Editorials in Saturday’s Opinion Section Paint Complete Picture of Illegal Tax Freeze

Governor Bill Ritter could not have asked for a better time for Denver District Court Judge Christina Habas to rule on Ritter’s illegal tax freeze. By releasing the ruling on Friday afternoon, Bill Ritter’s bad press occurred during the weekend nadir of the news cycle. As the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News combine their weekend papers, the ruling’s timing ensured there would be only negative headlines in one newspaper, not two.

The Saturday Rocky Mountain News does contain a small Denver Post opinion section.  This allowed both the Post and the News editorial staffs to opine on the illegal tax freeze.

First, the Rocky Mountain News meticulously follows the legal reasoning of the decision:

Look, we're not questioning, the good faith of the governor and the Democratic majority in the legislature. They weren't trying to deceive voters. But in their push to find additional tax revenue, they apparently convinced themselves that they were rectifying, in effect, an oversight of their predecessors. Wasn't it obvious, they concluded, that school districts already had earned the right to collect more property taxes because of "de-Brucing" elections (named after TABOR's author, Douglas Bruce) they'd held years before, mostly between 1996 and 1998?

Um, no - as [ Judge Christina ] Habas clearly explains in her ruling. The judge points to one authority after another, including the Legislative Council and two former directors of the School Finance Unit, who over the years concluded that school districts, even after de-Brucing, could not exploit rising property values to collect more tax revenue in the way envisioned by SB 199.

The Denver Post, a longtime cheerleader for the Bill Ritter’s illegal tax freeze, tries to shift the blame to the courts and restates the Governor’s original talking points about the freeze:

Gov. Bill Ritter's vision for Colorado was delivered another setback Friday.

This time, the damage was done by a district court judge. The governor's property-tax freeze, a cornerstone of his first year in office, was ruled unconstitutional by District Court Judge Christina Habas.

 

We supported Ritter's tax freeze as a giant step toward reforming the state budget and preserving local control of our schools. The governor intended money from the freeze to go into the state education fund to help at-risk kids attend preschool and full-day kindergarten.

The Post contradicts itself four paragraphs later and states the actual purpose of the illegal tax freeze:

Lawmakers in 2007 approved that bill, which called for locking most school districts' property-tax rates at current levels, allowing local school districts to collect more tax money. The state, in return, can use the money it saves for other purposes.

 

In other words, the so-called “Colorado Children’s Amendment” was never about the children. The schools get no more money under this bill. It is just a way to increase general fund play money for Bill Ritter and the legislature.

The Post reluctantly concludes its editorial urging the only legal way to increase state revenue.

We hope eventually voters themselves will give back to lawmakers the ability to budget our money without having to jump through all of these nettlesome and needless hoops.

The Post is half right. Voters, if asked, may approve more money for the schools. However, those “nettlesome and needless hoops” in TABOR protect the state’s taxpayers from Bill Ritter and the legislature’s bait-and-switch funding tactics.

by Civil Sense