The Act 72 Countdown

WARNING: INSIPID WONKTACULAR PENNSYLVANIA POLICY DISCUSSION FOLLOWS

A great thing about my legal experience to date has been the opportunity to work with school districts and educators. Education is something I've been interested in for a while, and it's fascinating to see how the social ideal of an educated populace plays out as political turf at every level. I'd like to do some extended writing about ideas and issues with relevance to education generally and No Child Left Behind specifically. Timeliness, though, compels me to write now (or never) about the fate of Pennsylvania's Act 72. Obviously, anything I say here is mine alone, and not the opinion of my firm or any of our school district clients.

It's not often there's a political issue at the Commonwealth level that's this fascinating as a scrum between divided interests and actual ideas. This one's got it all.

In the early morning hours of an evening last summer a bill introduced on the state legislative floor having nothing to do with either slots casinos or school district funding morphed into one that deals with both. Act 72 has nuances that will be discussed later, but the short version is that it asks school districts to decide whether they want a piece of the slot machine pie to reduce property taxes. If they say no now, they say no forever. If they say yes, an average of $322 annually of property tax relief may fall to each homeowner. The catch, though, is that to opt in, a district has to agree to levy an additional .1% personal income tax/EIT, and the district must agree to submit any future budgetary tax increases exceeding the COLA increase to public referendum. What say ye, Dr. Faustus?

The current standings show that out of 501 total school districts, we've got 318 opting out of the slots money and 96 opting in to the slots money. (That's shorthand, of course. The opt-decision is about a good bit more than just slots money.) I've been projecting the numbers the last few days, and am consistently coming up with 380 to 384 eventual "no" votes. That might be an understatement, though, because I'm assuming a constant stream of no-to-yes, when reality is that some will take Geddy Lee's option and choose not to decide, thereby making a choice (read: no). What I'm wondering is: what's the magic number that makes it politically untenable to cram it down the districts' throats? Will 375 out of 501 declining do it? Would 400, or 80%, do it? Or is there no number that would dissuade a determined man and his army of (one-armed) bandits?

Thus far, 77% of Pennsylvania's school districts have decided to play Moe Green to Ed Rendell's Michael. Stay tuned to see whether by midsummer there's pinkish blood flowing freely from their eyes.

UPDATE: Final tally was 111 districts opting in, 387 opting out. Just shy of 80%.