Vote No: New tax won't fix failing education system

If the governor’s line-item veto is allowed to stand, then the compromises that were negotiated 15 years ago to govern our K-12 educational funding will be out the window, and the state will become party to an action that punishes those school systems that willingly spent more on education than the state-wide average. Strange tactics, indeed, from a governor who claims to believe that improving education is the key to transforming the state’s future.

The size of this millage is not the only concern, though; here are two more. 

To begin, there is the question of transparency. Voters, ideally, should be able to understand how their hard earned taxes are being spent.

In Washtenaw County, though, the situation is murky because the Washtenaw Intermediate School District [WISD] funds so many different kinds of activities. As its charter specifies, it provides special education services for students in the district. But then in addition, it performs educational services such as accounting and human resources for some of the schools in its district. And, if we pass this millage, it will also be providing direct funding to schools within its jurisdiction.

Three different kinds of missions, and three different revenue streams all muddied up in one set of books. Voters will never be able to understand where their money is going. 

To cite just one obvious example, WISD consolidation of “back office” operations is obviously good if it reduces costs, but if that is true, then why hasn’t every school system within WISD signed up to take advantage of this service? Why hasn’t the Ann Arbor School District, the largest within WISD, availed itself of these services?

And where are the savings? We have looked at every ballot proposal on every township, village, and city ballot for the last 7 years and cannot find a single instance in which voters have been asked to approve a millage reduction as a consequence of WISD generated savings.

 Then there is the question of whether this is the right kind of tax. Property tax revenues follow property values, and the declining real estate values that Washtenaw County is now experiencing suggest that the revenues raised by this new tax will decline over the next few years.

Unfortunately, MEA-driven funding needs for our schools will increase, not decline.

In some Washtenaw County school districts, salary-schedule increases exceed 2 percent per year, step-chart increases for teachers in the early years of their career exceed 5 percent per year, and teachers who earn an advanced degree will see salary increases of as much as 15 percent.

All of these may be good from a policy standpoint, but all of them together guarantee that the funding needed to support faculty salaries will increase. Couple this with MEA intransigence on fringe benefits—principally health care costs—and the upward pressure on school budgets will become intolerable.

Does it make sense to try to support an ever-increasing funding need with a flat-to-declining revenue source? Clearly not.


Throwing more revenue at a system that is as fundamentally broken as this one is just asking for trouble, especially since there is no long term plan to bring future MEA demands in line with our schools’ ability to pay. We need to develop a method to synchronize revenue streams with cost streams. We do not need to put a temporary patch on an ever-expanding balloon that will inevitably blow up in our faces at some point in the future.



Wyckham Seelig
 Vice-Chairman Washtenaw County Republican Party