Sen. Andy Hill’s claims of funding education don’t add up | Letter
Published 9:25 am Tuesday, September 30, 2014
I am writing to counter the claims that Sen. Andy Hill regularly makes about what he has done for education funding.
Claim No. 1 – $1 billion for K-12 education added without accounting gimmicks or tricks.
First, 57 percent of the additional money that was put into K-12 this last biennium came from one-time sources. That means we are starting from scratch to come up with a significant portion of education funding next year. Second, Sen. Hill orchestrated a complicated swap, taking hundreds of millions of dollars out of the Public Works Trust Account for infrastructure projects and moving it to education accounts. He then back-filled just a portion of that infrastructure funding with $155 million worth of bonds to be paid over 25 years at 4-percent interest.
This is another of Sen. Hill’s favorite claims. Here he is referencing the budget passed in March 2013, which added an additional $58 million to education. What the statistic does not tell you is the impact of that amount. The amount added equals 1 percent of the amount required by the Supreme Court’s McCleary decision requiring the legislature to increase education funding, which is $4-5 billion of additional funding over the next four years. Its a drop in the bucket.
