Education funding bill likely to leave Pawlenty with another override battle on his hands

Gov. Tim Pawlenty already received one black eye this legislative session when a bipartisan coalition voted to override his veto of the transportation bill. Now another piece of legislation, the education finance bill, is causing our chief executive and wannabe veep to take up another round of arm twisting, threats and hard negotiation to avoid a second embarrassing veto override.

As of late Wednesday afternoon, Pawlenty hadn’t yet vetoed the education finance bill passed Tuesday evening. But House Minority Leader Marty Seifert, R-Marshall, flatly stated yesterday that a veto would be forthcoming. According to Seifert, passing the bill flouted Pawlenty’s wish to put education funding on the table as part of his office’s global budget negotiations with the Legislature over how to resolve the current $935 million deficit.

But earlier on Tuesday, the House had honored that spirit of negotiation by suspending its deliberations on the education finance bill while its leadership met with the governor. When those negotiations reached another impasse, however, legislators became wary. Continuing to leave everything up for grabs in the global budget deal would only strengthen Pawlenty’s negotiating position as the deadline for ending the session drew closer.

Another couple of days without passage of the education finance bill, for example, would have enabled the governor to veto the bill without enough time for legislators to override before adjournment. Consequently, when talks were snagged later Tuesday afternoon, the House, quickly followed by the Senate, reconvened and passed the bill with veto-proof majorities.

If, as expected, Pawlenty does veto the bill, he will be …

Continued: Click “Read More”denying a one-time increase of $51 per pupil to the education funding formula, derived without raising any taxes. Instead, the legislation would raise the extra $44 million by raiding the Q Comp fund used for teacher merit raises, cutting some of the budget for testing and doing some accounting shifts. The Q Comp fund is a pet Pawlenty program heartily defended by Republicans (and some Democrats) during debate on the bill. Yet a dramatic lack of participation — only 39 of 340 school districts, plus 21 charter schools, currently use Q Comp — has left the fund with a surplus of more than $20 million at a time when schools across the state are desperate for operating revenue. While it is true that the teachers union has stymied the participation in many districts, many rural school systems simply lack the personnel and resources to go through the Q Comp application process, resulting in a significant urban bias in Q Comp participation.

Meanwhile, $44 million in even one-time monies looks good for schools facing a miserly 1 percent increase in the state’s education funding formula in fiscal year 2009. The most optimistic economic forecasts peg the 2009 inflation rate higher than that, which means that schools will have less real purchasing power in 2009 than they had in fiscal year 2008, at a time when rising costs for transportation, heating and health insurance are already threatening to bust budgets. Add in Pawlenty’s current desire to cap property taxes (the one place school districts could go to offset penurious state funding), and the budgetary picture turns even grimmer.

And that’s precisely why 13 House Republicans crossed party lines to pass the ed bill — eight more than it would take to override a veto, if it comes to that. Some of these aye votes were from conservative stalwarts such as Torrey Westrom, R-Elbow Lake; Kurt Zellars, R-Maple Grove; Denny McNamara, R-Hastings; and Bud Nornes, R-Fergus Falls. It is doubtful that all, or even most, of these legislators will ultimately go against the governor over the comparative pittance of $44 million in one-time monies. Yet the strength of this bipartisan support dramatizes the dire financial plight of the schools under Pawlenty’s watch. Yesterday it reduced the governor to dispatching Republican legislators to tell their DFL brethren that the Central Corridor light-rail line wouldn’t get green-lighted by the governor if this education finance bill was passed.

“The Republicans in the House were pummeled by the governor’s people about this bill and 13 of them still voted for it,” said Mindy Greiling, DFL Roseville, chair of the House K-12 Education Finance Division. “The governor can wheedle along and object to what we are doing, but we have a good negotiating tool and it is called the specter of the override. Now it is true that we might not get an override, but the consolation there is that the [Republican] flip-floppers who don’t vote for an override will be in political trouble. Because we have been so stingy with education for so long that people are mad, especially the property-tax payers, at how we have not funded schools at the state level.”