The Utah Legislature has proposed a dramatic tax overhaul in the form of House Bill 441). How does HB441 help Utah? We don’t know every way it will help but we do know one way in which it won’t — education funding.
Utah has a budget revenue surplus of about $1.3 billion this year. HB441 proposes lowering income taxes and taxing services instead. What isn’t being said is that education funding is tied constitutionally to our income taxes. Last year, the Legislature lowered income taxes from 5 percent to 4.95 percent, which reduced education funding by $55 million annually. If income taxes are lowered as proposed in HB441 to 4.75 percent, the annual reduction in education funding is an additional $220 million. For a total of $275 million lost to education each year.
For years, the Legislature has promised educators that education needs would be adequately funded when there was a surplus. What better time than now when there is over $1 billion in surplus? Now, HB441 is proposing a tax cut that will take away education funding.
The proponents of the bill state that it will be “revenue neutral.” How can this claim be true when there is no way to know if the new taxes generated will be equal to what is lost in the tax cut? This uncertainty leaves our children to pay the unknown price for less funding.
If the increase of sales tax on services is equal to the decrease in income tax, why even pass the bill? We are told this bill will be revenue neutral but, what we actually need is to increase education funding.
Rep. Tim Quinn, R-Heber, the sponsor of HB441, stated that education will be held harmless. Yet, nowhere in HB441 is this guaranteed. If education is not to have any negative consequences from the bill, language protecting education funding must be added. K-12 funding must be safeguarded, and the only ones who can do that are the legislators themselves. They also need sufficient time to study the bill and to make the public aware of the details. Two weeks from the time the bill was unveiled until the end of the legislative session is not enough time to make an informed decision.
One job of the Legislature is to ensure our students have what they need. Each year more and more students come to school with increasing needs. We need more counselors, more nurses, more social workers, more mental health professionals, more paraprofessionals working with special education students and more aides to work with regular education students that need extra help. There isn’t enough money to pay for existing needs let alone the changing needs of the students coming into our classrooms.
The bottom line is this is a huge gamble with our children’s education and their futures. Quinn is proposing this as a $650 a year tax cut for the average family in Utah. This tax cut will come at what cost and with no guarantee that education will be held harmless. The Legislature doesn’t know all the ramifications and they need to know more before they pass this bill.
A cut to income taxes sounds good but the devil is in the details, and the details have not been clarified. The Legislature should be helping public education funding to grow. Yet sadly, this bill, in its present state, does not do that. Education funding needs to be protected and added to, not gutted. Please contact your local legislators and ask them to keep their promises to Utah’s students, parents and educators by voting against House Bill 441.
Lara Slade
Lara Slade is a teacher in the Murray City School District and the representative for the Wasatch Uniserv on the Utah Education Association Board of Directors. The Uniserv serves teachers associations in the Murray, Salt Lake and Tooele school districts. Also signing this statement are James Lewis, Wasatch Uniserv director; Mark Durfey, Wasatch Uniserv president and Murray Education Association president; Amy Roberds, Murray Education Association vice president; James Tobler, Salt Lake Education Association president; Mike Harman, Salt Lake Education Association vice president; Rick Harrison, Tooele Education Association president; Becca Hall, Tooele Education Association vice president.