November 05, 2010 05:16 PM UTC

Higher Ed Tax Hike?

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• by: IndyNinja

On Thursday, the Higher Education Strategic Planning Committee recommended that the Colorado General Assembly consider referring a measure to the voters to increase taxes to fund Higher Education.

The committee presented five options for the tax increase in the nearly 40 page report which can be found here.

But how realistic is that?

Even when democrats were in control of both houses of the Colorado legislature, they had trouble with this. HCR 10-1002 would have made a exemption in the TABOR laws for education funding. It failed to even get all of the democrats to vote for it, much less the 2/3 required to refer it to the voters. And what’s more, many people are pointing to that measure as one of the causes of the downfall of it’s prime sponsor, Rep. Benefield.

Now that the Republicans control the house, and the vast majority of them have signed the Colorado Union of Taxpayers pledge to not raise taxes, how exactly does anyone hope to pass this measure?

And even if they did, it is not likely to have the Governor’s support, since Hickenlooper ran on a platform of not raising taxes.

Much more likely is that the Higher Ed leaders hope to get the Republicans to vote no on this so that they can use it against them in the next election (“So and so voted against education funding”), and then run it as a citizen’s initiative anyway.

The task force was assembled by Governor Ritter last Spring amidst threats from college and university presidents that they would begin making recommendations without his support if he didn’t do something about their funding problems. And in fact, under the direction of Senate Majority Leader Morse and Minority Leader Penry, they did just that, passing a “Higher Education Flexibility Bill” (SB 10-003) which allows colleges and universities to raise tuition as much as 9% without any outside approval and can raise it even further with the approval of the Colorado Commission of Higher Education, whose members are appointed by the Governor and son’t answer to the General Assembly or the voters.

So on top of limitless tuition increases, higher ed now wants a tax increase, too.

But is there really any chance of them getting it?