(a loose-knit group of TABOR skeptics, including
local government,
education, labor, religious, health-care and social-services advocates.)
Resources Available on the
Internet for TABOR Watchers
(many on the Wisconsin Alliance of Cities web site)
By Rich Eggleston
communications and community outreach coordinator
Wisconsin Alliance of Cities
In Wisconsin, the 'Taxpayers Bill of Rights' is being billed as a tool of democracy, but it's actually a tool to subvert the representative democracy that to reasonable people has worked pretty well. When Milwaukee-area resident Orville Seymeyer e-mailed me and suggested I "get on the TABOR bandwagon," this is what I told him:
The founding fathers intended that
representative democracy reflect the will of the people. And representative democracy has
done a good job of that. When folks in Wisconsin decided they wanted one of the best
university systems in the country, representative government provided them with one. You
may want to check out a book that talks about how that happenened. It's called "A
Champagne University on a Beer Budget." It was written by Phillip Altbach.
I like the University of Wisconsin System even though I went to a private institution.
Since TABOR passed in Colorado per-capita spending on higher education there has fallen
from 31st in the country to 47th. The University of Colorado is on the verge of becoming a
private university. A government that did that to the UW would not be representing me.
I like local governments filling the potholes in the roads. In Wisconsin, we pay more for
roads than folks in Colorado or the rest of the country (40% more than the national
average, in fact) but we pay less to wheel realignment and tire repair businesses.
Government is representing me when it provides me with good roads. Colorado has
accumulated $30 billion in deferred highway maintenance since TABOR squeaked into its
constitution on its third try in 1992.
I like Wisconsin's top quality schools, even though I don't have any kids in those
schools. I think it's a responsibility of government to provide citizens with good public
schools, as well as good libraries. Since TABOR passed in Colorado, schools there have
slipped dramatically. The high-school graduation rate in Colorado has fallen from 31st in
the country to 48th. A government that allowed that to happen wouldn't be representing me.
Those are examples of the kinds of things that Ed (Huck, my boss) may have been talking
about when he said TABOR takes away the ability of government to be creative.
Representative government has also responded to the desires of the public to control
spending. Spending by state and local governments in Wisconsin has dropped toward the
national average over the last 20 years, from 15.6% above the national average in 1983 to
7.7% above it in 2002.
I think that's an example of how representative government has heard the public and
responded. I'd rather have a system in which elected officials listen to a broad range of
citizens' views, balance those views and respond as best they can than have a system that
puts government on autopilot. The airlines could probably offer really low ticket prices
if they did away with the cockpit crew and had computers take off, fly and land airplanes.
Would you buy one of those discount tickets? I wouldn't. I feel more comfortable when
government has a crew in the cockpit too.
If you don't think representative government is doing the job fast enough, I urge you to
make the case to your local city council, school board or village board. I live in a
fast-growing suburb of Madison. When my city council passed a budget that the mayor and I
thought was excessive, the mayor vetoed about $200,000 from the city budget, and I
testified to the council to sustain the vetoes. The reason, I told the city council, was
that the public mood -- TABOR, the tax freeze, all the public opinion polls I have seen --
does not embrace levy increases of the magnitude in the original budget. Instead the
council overrode the mayor. The council members said the need for additional staffing at
one of our fire stations and the need for an additional building inspector to oversee
complaints from a troubled apartment complex was a more compelling need than the need to
pare the levy by $200,000.
That's representative government at work, and I wrote a guest editorial for my local
newspaper saying that I accepted the city council's decision because the council members
are the people who have a vast amount more knowledge of the city budget, do an incredible
amount of homework, and their judgment was much better informed than mine. I was willing
to accept the decision that representative government made for me. If TABOR were enacted,
there should be a homework requirement for citizens to ensure that their decisions are as
informed as those of our elected representatives.
Don't think of taxes in the narrow sense of the definition you cited. It's a definition
that is made to distinguish between a tax and a fee, and Wisconsin, as a result of court
decisions, unfortunately has a narrow definition of fee that covers only services
"rendered," not services "offered."
As a result, local government must put police, fire and ambulance service on the property
tax, instead of charging a fee that would better assess the genuinely high cost of those
services to those who benefit from having the service available. I 'm getting up in years,
and I'm interested in having the best possible ambulance sevice available in my community
in case my dissolute lifestyle catches up with me. And a few minutes of response time for
the fire department often makes the difference between saving the home and saving only the
foundation.
I expect representative government to make the decision of what response time for the
firefighters, police and ambulance services in my community best meets my needs. I don't
want to put my elected representatives in a box. If I do, I could end up in a box before
my time.
I urge you to become involved in government. I promised my wife that I would never run for
office again after I ran for the Dane County Board a few years ago and lost by 90 votes,
but I am a loyal fan of politics in my community, and write guest editorials and news
stories for my local paper. I'm a recovering journalist, but I occasionally fall off the
wagon.
As you may suspect, I care deeply for the representative government under which we live. I
also bristle at the misrepresentations that the pro-TABOR forces make every day. After 25
years in the news business I'm addicted in facts. That's why I'm not jumping on the TABOR
bandwagon. It's why I'm working day and night to defeat it. But we can work together to
make government work better and more efficiently for the citizens of Wisconsin. That's
what representative government is all about.
TABOR was born in Colorado in 1992, but didn't arrive in Wisconsin until 1999, a stowaway aboard an airplane on which state legislators returned from a corporate-sponsored conference of the American Legislative Exchange Council.
Flat-taxer Dick Armey's Citizens for a Sound Economy has been importing TABOR to other states, as has the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation.
By the time TABOR's supporters in Wisconsin became convinced in late 2003 that it had political sex appeal, it had lost much of its glamour in Colorado, but in the dim light in which political decisions are made in our state, policymakers didn't notice that over a 44-month period ending in December 2004, for example, Colorado hemorrhaged 68,000 jobs.
I and others did notice, and mounted a campaign to highlight TABOR's shortcomings while pushing initiatives to give the taxpayer more value for his or her dollar, to make government smarter, not just cheaper, to counter the drive for TABOR.
Our loose-knit confederation of local-government,
education, public-employee, health-care, religious and human-services advocacy groups that
spread the word about TABOR with an effective four-pronged message:
Here, in chronological order, are some of the arguments we and others presented to the public both in Wisconsin and elsewhere before the TABOR movement collapsed in Wisconsin: (pdf files require Adobe Acrobat Reader to open.)
- A Wisconsin TABOR must couple any cuts in local government assistance with a reduction in the income tax or sales tax rates, include anti-mandate language and provide constitutional protection against state legislators getting political points for eroding local tax base, we advised the Legislature in December, 2003. Click here.
- Colorado has experienced its worst economic slump in 15 years, yet Wisconsin's sponsors of TABOR are crowing about Colorado's economic performance and attributing it to TABOR, the Alliance of Cities said with barely concealed astonishment in January, 2004. Click here.
- By February, we had discovered the flaws of Colorado's TABOR. As the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute described in a 2003 memo on the subject, TABOR includes a "ratcheting down effect," double-counts tax dollars when they flow from one unit of government to another, and has other shortcomings. Click here.
- And Carol Hedges of the Bell Policy Center in Colorado told a Wisconsin audience in February that the version of TABOR then before the Wisconsin Legislature (see AJR 55 background here.) would be more restrictive than Colorado's TABOR. See her advice to Wisconsin policymakers here.
- Also in February, David Newby, president of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO weighed in on TABOR in a guest column in the Wisconsin State Journal. TABOR is "a painful and inflexible way to control taxes which actually undermines the state economy, transportation and education systems, and leaves working people, children, the sick and the elderly out in the cold. This so-called taxpayer bill of rights is a destructive bill of goods that will cost Colorado residents dearly for years to come," Newby wrote. Column here.
- Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce released a public opinion poll at the end of February that claimed nearly 75% voter support for a "Taxpayer's Bill of Rights." News release here.
- By March, we had produced a resolution for interested communities, decrying the "fiscal straitjackets" in which California and Colorado had placed local government, saying transportation, education and the economy were at risk. Resolution here.
- In April, former University of Wisconsin political scientist Don Kettl weighed in on the issue, and traced the TABOR movement from Dick Armey to a desire by Wisconsin Republicans to re-ignite the Reagan Revolution in Wisconsin and embarrass Democratic Gov. Jim "No-Tax-Increase" Doyle. Column here.
- I wrote in the Green Bay Press-Gazette in May that leaving critical taxing decisions to voters sometimes doesn't work. "In Colorado, voters rejected a multi-billion dollar project to provide water for future generations. Oh well, let them drink beer," I wrote, ever mindful of boosting Wisconsin's economy. (Colorado, alas, lacks a brewery worthy of the name.) Column here.
- A few days later, TABOR critics got a big boost from former Republican Gov. Lee S. Dreyfus, who told legislators who had promised to control taxes, "...now I hear you saying that you are not able to keep taxes and spending from increasing. Therefore we should have a constitutional amendment so the people can do what you were elected to do. During the Holy season, I can’t avoid the similarity of Pilate washing his hands of the matter at hand and turning the decision over to the people." Column here.
- In mid-May, Scott Anderson, executive director of the Wisconsin Council of Churches, wrote on Op-Ed piece acknowledging that he is a refugee from California, and pleading not to be sent back. "Arbitrary formulas remove the responsibility we have entrusted to our elected leaders and subvert our democratic system. They simply can’t do the job we elect state legislators and the Governor to do for us," Anderson wrote. "Just look at my former home, California. What a mess." Column here.
- Rep. Glenn Grothman filed papers to run against Senate Majority Leader Mary Panzer on July 12, violating a Wisconsin tradition that Republicans don't resort to the ballot box to resolve their differences. The basis of the differences between Panzer and Grothman? Panzer's failure to deliver Senate votes for a TABOR-like proposal drafted by Assembly Speaker John Gard. Story here.
- Panzer responded by joining Gard in calling a special session (actually, an "extraordinary" session because it was called by legislative leaders, not the governor) on TABOR, just in time to keep Democratic legislators from attending the Democratic National Convention. The session accomplished little except earn Panzer and Gard the enmity of Democrats. Gard's version of TABOR never came to a vote.
- "At the end, the call for a special legislative session to approve a constitutional amendment to limit government spending appeared more like a comedy routine than deliberative debate," the Journal Sentinel intoned July 28 in an editorial here. John Torinus, CEO of Serigraph Inc., West Bend, wrote July 31 that Assembly Speaker John Gard "ended up with his pants around his Republican ankles" as a result of the showdown, in a guest column here.
- But some people's glee over collapse of TABOR was short-lived. After a bitter race, Grothman crushed Panzer in the Republican primary. Story here. And Sen. Scott Fitzgerald, Panzer's replacement in her leadership post promised to make TABOR his top priority in 2005. Stories here and here.
- But Sen. Fitzgerald's tenure as Senate Majority Leader proved to be shortlived. In a surprise move engineered by moderate Republicans, Sen. Dale Schultz (R-Richland Center) succeeded him shortly after the November election. Story here.
- By early 2005, the shortcomings of TABOR in Colorado were
becoming more and more apparent. Stories and letters to the editor appeared in Wisconsin
about how TABOR was shortchanging Colorado's infrastructure needs.
"...Then there are the roads in Colorado," Tim Heimerl of Westminster, Colo., wrote in a letter to the Wisconsin State Journal. "Like the idea of having your wheels aligned two times a year due to terribly rutted highways? ...Snow removal is a joke. Your old car will cost you hundreds of collars to register annually. You start to notice your car is under constant repair due to excessive wear and tear, all for modestly lower taxes..." Letter here.
- There also were stories about how Democrats took control of both houses of the Colorado legislature for the first time in 40 years, and the business community was one a leading supporter of a TABOR fix. Story here.
- And there was some serious analysis about the flaws in TABOR's growth formula. The Washington, D.C.-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' analysis of those shortcomings is here.