I missed this travesty when it was first published, but thanks to an approving letter, which came to my attention through Brian Hubbell’s essential MDISchools news blog, I’m on top of it now!

A Portland Press Herald editorial on May 20 (”School elections unneeded for uncontroversial budgets“) tells us:

One way to read the low turnout at recent school budget elections is that people were happy enough with what was proposed to stay home.Budgets were crafted knowing that there would be a public referendum, and school officials did a good-enough job addressing people’s concerns that voters didn’t feel they needed another errand on Election Day. When a city like Portland shells out $20,000 so that about 2,000 people can vote, however, it’s worth asking if elections are worth it.

But if there were no election at the end of the process, would school officials be as careful building the budget? The answer is to find a way to trigger a district-wide vote on budgets that promise to be controversial. The law could be amended to call for a vote for any budget that results in a tax increase, or one that increases spending above the Consumer Price Index.

You need to read the whole thing.  It’s confusingly written, but the message seems to be that school officials can avoid votes buy keeping increases below certain trigger levels. What is “controversial” is decided in advance, just once, and forever after hold your peace!

The approving letter, mentioned above, tells us more, namely that Hannah Pingree has proposed such a law, which “would have required a referendum only if the school budget grew faster than the level of the Essential Programs and Services baseline budget for an individual school district.”

Here’s the example given:

In Portland, for example, voters approved last year a school budget that was 15.56 percent over the EPS baseline standard for fiscal year 2008-2009. LD 1414 would have enabled Portland to bypass elections this year, as long as the budget for fiscal year 2009-2010 remained under this already approved 15.56 percent above EPS threshold.

So if you hated last year’s budget, if there was demonstrable fraud in how those funds were used, if the school-age population in Portland schools dropped, or if the mix of programs offered changed, if any of a myriad of circumstances changed, you, as Portland voter would still have no vote!

Probably this is for the better, though.  Democracy is so messy.