With just three weeks to go until the new fiscal year, most taxpayers have yet to hear how much they’ll be paying to support East Valley classrooms. School taxes are typically the largest portion of a homeowner’s tax bill. Public education eats up 46 percent of the state budget.


Yet most school districts wait until the end of June to make their proposed budgets public — giving residents just two weeks to offer input on how their tax dollars will be spent to educate children.

The Arizona Tax Research Association (ATRA) released some community college per-student cost figures in July stating that Yavapai College is the highest in Arizona.


Bob Lynch, chief financial officer for Yavapai College, said school officials know the college is among the highest on full-time student equivalent (FTSE) cost.

Despite increased state funding for education in recent years, school districts remain dependent on having budget overrides — and asking voters to pay for the costly habit.


In just about every election cycle there are East Valley school districts asking voters to approve or renew a budget override, a boost to the budget paid for through a secondary property tax.

Recent stories regarding next Tuesday's school override and bond elections have included claims from a school-district campaign consultant that recent homeowner property taxes increased because "business taxes went down while homeowner taxes went up." This misdirection merits a response.


In recent years, the Legislature did indeed enact changes to business property-tax calculations. However, the impact of those changes on homeowners was addressed in a number of ways.

Scottsdale's schools and city government have collected more bond debt than the majority of their counterparts around the state, according to a recently released report.


Arizona's state and local agencies collectively reported $32.1 billion worth of bond debt in fiscal 2007, an 11 percent increase from fiscal 2006, according to figures compiled by the state Department of Revenue's Debt Oversight Commission and released by the Arizona Tax Research Association.

One of the more persistent public-policy myths in Arizona is that the state has been shortchanging primary and secondary education. Not infrequently, the claim is made that per-pupil spending, adjusted for inflation, has actually been decreasing.


This is manifestly false.

The reductions in Maricopa County property tax rates, as reported Aug. 19 in the Tribune, provide some good news for property taxpayers. Yet, as school district property taxes are affected not only by the school districts but also by the districts’ voters and the state Legislature, it is important for taxpayers to know who contributed to the tax rate declines and who actually inhibited the rates from falling as far as they would have otherwise.

A conservative think tank and a taxpayer-advocacy organization have backed off plans to sue the Tucson Unified School District in an attempt to clamp down on the millions of dollars it gets every year in desegregation funding.


The Goldwater Institute and the Arizona Tax Research Association had been readying for a bid to challenge the constitutionality of the district's levy to help bring schools into racial balance, preparing to argue that it's illegal to levy unlimited property taxes for an unlimited time without voter approval.

The economy apparently was on voters' minds Tuesday when they walked into Valley voting booths to address school-district spending through bonds and budget overrides.


Valley voters supported only 20 of the 36 school-district bonds and budget overrides on the ballot in Maricopa County, according to unofficial results. That was down considerably from last year, when voters supported 28 of 31 budget measures. Voters' action comes amid a period of deep cuts to state education spending because of the state budget crisis.

The Arizona Republic's report of a charter school under investigation for inappropriately receiving state funds for educating private-school students highlights a pervasive problem throughout Arizona's school-finance system.