As Colorado contemplated large cuts to public education earlier this year, Rollie Heath wished that the state would raise taxes instead.Although Heath is a member of the Democratic majority in the state Senate and sits on the powerful appropriations committee, he didn’t try to use his legislative influence to persuade lawmakers to pass a tax increase. Instead, his approach was to do something any Coloradan could have done: He offered a citizens’ initiative.
Heath’s measure would raise both sales and income taxes over the next five years and use the roughly $3 billion generated to restore money to education, from preschool to higher ed. The measure officially qualified for November’s ballot last week. So a momentous decision about taxing and spending will be made by Colorado’s voters, not the state’s legislators.
In Colorado, Heath’s approach was the only one available to him. Under the state’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, all tax increases must be approved on the ballot. Yet even in other states where the legislature retains the power to set tax rates, supporters of tax increases are contemplating the same approach of going to the voters. In Nevada, business and labor groups are talking about bringing a major tax increase to the ballot. In California, leading labor unions are considering the same strategy for 2012.
Historically, ballot initiatives have more often been used to curtail taxes than to raise them. That’s been true in California, Nevada and Colorado as much as anywhere else. It’s not clear that voters today are any more amenable to tax increases than they’ve been in the past.
What has changed, though, is the obstacles to passing tax increases in legislatures. Those obstacles include supermajority requirements and other rules that make it particularly difficult to raise taxes. They also include a Republican Party that has become more united in opposition to tax hikes at the same time that it enjoys control of either the governorship or at least one house of the legislature in 39 states. In that context, supporters of higher taxes have begun to wonder whether going directly to the ballot is now the easiest way — and perhaps even the only politically plausible way — to raise taxes.
Signature strategy
When Heath began promoting his initiative earlier this year, most of the Colorado political world scoffed. Governor John Hickenlooper, a Democrat like Heath, declared that the state had “no appetite” for tax increases this year. Even the Colorado Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union, withheld its endorsements. Heath, who lost by a 2-to-1 margin as the Democratic nominee for governor in 2002, seemed to be on another quixotic quest.
That changed when Heath turned in 142,000 signatures to get his measure on the ballot, including 1,000 he gathered himself. Now, teachers’ unions and the state association of school boards are backing the initiative. Heath hopes he’s building a popular movement for increasing revenues in a state where per-pupil spending is $1,800 below the national average and where K-12 education was cut by more than $200 million this year. “We’ve gone too far,” Heath says. “You can’t separate jobs and economic development from education.”
Credit: Credit: istockpihoto
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