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Hard to imagine, indeed

Florida counties are charging impact fees and raising taxes to try to pay for new schools while the governor boasts $14-billion in tax relief.

Florida counties are so desperate for money to build new schools they have turned to local sales taxes and eye-popping impact fees. But the education governor is unmoved. Against all evidence to the contrary, Gov. Jeb Bush suggests the districts are being extravagant.

"If you curb the growth in spending, then you don't have to tax everything that walks or talks or breathes," Bush told the Times. "I think there's a tendency to not curb spending."

Is that so? How, exactly, would he find classrooms for the 138,000 new students in the past three years? Ask for donations from Habitat for Humanity?

Unless districts are prepared to turn away students, most of them need more schools. Polk County, which added 5,000 new students over the past three years, discovered that the money it receives from the state doesn't begin to cover the expenses. So Polk, like 22 other counties, charges an impact fee on new single-family homes. Its fee, $8,596, is the highest in the state. Roughly the same number of counties, with approval of their voters, levy their own sales taxes to help them pay for schools. New buildings don't simply sprout from the ground.

In the debate over impact fees, Bush is aligning himself with home builders. The builders don't like the trend they see, and the extent to which impact fees inflate new home prices. Unlike the builders, though, Bush is in a position to offer a viable alternative. The fact that he has not is one of the reasons the impact fees continue to grow.

"The problem of school capacity is becoming a crisis in many jurisdictions in Florida, and this is the response," Jim Nicholas, a University of Florida urban planning professor, recently told a state impact fee task force. "We're trying to do a dollar's worth of spending with 15 cents worth of revenue, and it doesn't fit."

Bush doesn't seem eager to provide the other 85 cents. His education board chairman, Phil Handy, recently mused to the media that "it's hard to imagine" where the state could find $2-billion to pay for new school buildings next year. Yet the governor himself claims to have provided $14-billion in tax relief during his tenure. And this year, facing a $5-billion revenue windfall, the state devoted only $83-million for new schools to reduce class size.

So, yes, $8,596 is a lot of impact fee and $2-billion is a lot of money. But so is $14-billion.

Under Florida's statewide system of education, the governor and Legislature are supposed to pay the bills. But that is not happening. Instead, they are focused on creating a sense of financial urgency they think will convince voters to repeal a constitutional initiative that limits the number of students in each classroom. The class size initiative, passed in 2002, does increase the number of necessary new school buildings, but parents won't be easily persuaded to give up kindergartens with only 18 students.

The financial reality is that Florida ranks 48th in per-pupil spending, and school districts and county voters continue to try to pick up where the state has left off. If Bush thinks that school buildings are a form of financial largesse, then maybe he ought to identify which students get to stand out in the cold.

[Last modified November 18, 2005, 22:43:02]