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Michael Peltier: High court takes hot issues off ballot
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TALLAHASSEE — Political junkies looking for a handful of good spats over the next few months had hopes dashed last week as the Florida Supreme Court spoiled their fun.
With a trio of unanimous opinions, the state’s highest court threw a wet blanket on many a zealot by ruling unconstitutional amendments to restructure the way state and local governments pay for public education while also deep-sixing two measures protecting the use of tax money for private schools.
The defeat also struck a blow to the Taxation and Budget Reform Commission, which meets every 20 years and authored the controversial measures.
The education issues had promised to elicit heated debate from a number of corners as voters addressed issues of taxes and how much support taxpayers should give to private education.
In speedy rulings released only hours after the issues were presented to them in court, justices validated what appeared to be earlier skepticism of the proposals as they fired questions at attorneys representing various points of view earlier in the day.
Amendment 5 pitted business groups against Realtors and the governor over how to pay for public education. The proposal asked voters to eliminate $9 billion in local property taxes required for public schools.
The proposal promised to replace that money with funds from another source — presumably an increase in state sales tax — by budget reductions and/or the elimination of tax loopholes.
But justices balked, saying nowhere in the ballot summary did it explain to voters that the payback to school coffers was only guaranteed for a single school year. After that, lawmakers were not bound to do so.
“It is clear that our Florida Supreme Court Justices saw Amendment 5 for exactly what it was – nothing more than a bait and switch,” said Sen. Mike Haridopolos, R-Indialantic, and vocal critic of the tax swap.
School officials praised the court’s ruling, which upheld a lower court opinion that the ballot was misleading.
“In rejecting the measures, the court backed clear, unambiguous constitutional amendments – not proposals that mask their true meaning,” said Andy Ford, president of the Florida Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union.
The high court also struck down a pair of measures dealing with school vouchers and how local funds could be spent.
Amendment 7 would have repealed a provision that bars state financial aid to churches and other religious organizations. If approved, the amendment would have overturned earlier court rulings invalidating a program set up by former Gov. Jeb Bush to allow students to take public tax dollars with them to private schools if their own public school was failing.
Amendment 9 required that school districts spend at least 65 percent of their budgets on classroom instruction. A lower court ruling had also shot down that provision.
Their demise brought swift criticism by the proposals’ chief backer, who said the high court ruling puts in jeopardy another program that allows developmentally disabled students to attend private schools.
“These programs, as well as 350 charter schools in our great state, will remain in limbo, under the real threat of litigation from individuals who want to centralize all education decisions within government bureaucracies,” Bush said in a statement.
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Contact Michael Peltier at mpeltier1234@comcast.net
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Rationality is reappearing in the great state of Florida. Enough of the Bushes...
If this is the best that it has to offer, banish the Taxation and Budget Reform Commission... Apparently meeting every twenty years is too often.
#1 Posted by sunalsorises on September 7, 2008 at 10:27 p.m. (Suggest removal)
What a huge disappointment. An opportunity to have the costs of schools first paid by those who use that service and second, by the guests of our vacation destination "Sunshine" state.
How many parents of State of Florida public school students do not completely report and pay their tax obligations? Many work on the side for cash and a smaller few earn incomes involved in illegal markets, many while receiving government benefits to supplement their under reported incomes. These government benefits are paid by the same people who already disproportionately pay, for services they never receive nor demand, with their income and real estate tax payments.
Being a parent has to become a responsibility or we will be overrun with wandering children who have no parental figures mentoring their lives. These children living without any learned from home purpose, achieve the poor FCAT scores we read about each spring, bring down the level of public school education and take away from their peers who could learn in a more progressive fashion, if their classroom was not being held back.
These will be the same children who will be taught by Obama and the liberal left that they never had an opportunity to succeed because others who they never had any direct nor indirect contact with, who are golfing and playing tennis through their successfully earned lives, held them back. That is truly a sick reality; that anyone would mislead and destroy innocent vulnerable lives with lies.
Sales taxes are the best means to fund any and all services we require from all levels of government, city, county, state and federal. Sales taxes make certain that everyone pays their true obligation and gives each governmental entity a budget which these entities must learn to work within.
#2 Posted by LookingForLeaders on September 8, 2008 at 12:12 p.m. (Suggest removal)
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