August 02, 2011 07:06 PM UTC

Lobato vs. Colorado: Justice or Chaos?

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Durango Herald’s Joe Hanel reports:

A group of parents and 21 school districts – including Montezuma-Cortez – is suing the state in a case called Lobato v. Colorado, claiming inadequate funding for schools. Opening arguments took most of the morning Monday.

“This case begins with the constitution and ends with children,” said Kenzo Kawanabe, who made the plaintiffs’ opening argument.

The plaintiffs are basing their case on Colorado’s constitution, which requires a “thorough and uniform” system of education and local control of schools. They claim the state is violating both principles by not paying enough for schools, even as the Legislature passes more education-reform laws that school districts must follow…

The plaintiffs aren’t asking Denver District Judge Sheila Rappaport to order the extra funding, but they do want her to tell the Legislature that its school-funding formula is unconstitutional and needs to be changed.

Schools districts already use nearly half the state’s general fund budget, so such a ruling would require either steep cuts to other departments or a tax increase.

The state is going to argue that more money will not make the schools better.

Plaintiffs argue that Colorado schools are structurally underfunded by billions–somewhere between $1.4 and $3.6 billion dollars per year. In an excellent Colorado Public Radio report yesterday fairly examining both sides of this debate, Bruce Caughey of the Colorado Association of School Executives argues that it would require a minimum of an additional $1.5 billion per year for Colorado’s public school funding to simply reach the national average.

State officials including Gov. John Hickenlooper have come out in opposition to the plaintiffs in Lobato vs. Colorado, arguing that the constitution did not provide guidance on funding levels, and that this is a job better left to the legislature and the voters–particularly, though Gov. Hickenlooper didn’t say it, since Colorado is bound by the 1992 Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights to submit all tax increases to a vote.

However, one of the plaintiffs’ main arguments is the interlocking constitutional limitations and spending mandates in Colorado that have left the legislature unable to appropriate a constitutionally adequate level of funding for public schools. A combination of the Gallagher Amendment restricting property taxes and TABOR throttling the state’s ability to make up the difference, plaintiffs argue that the legislature–and every local school district in the state–has been placed in a constitutionally impermissible situation.

We’ve been talking about the Lobato case for years now as it has slowly wended its way toward trial. If they do prevail in court, and the many appeals such a victory would be sure to draw, it could dramatically shake up Colorado politics. The state could be forced to remedy the situation–maybe by neutering TABOR? Perhaps a comprehensive ballot measure or measures, with some nasty debt-ceiling style “triggers” threatening the reluctant? The possibilities!

Don’t get us wrong. We do understand and are sympathetic to the arguments made by defenders of the legislative process, and their warnings of chaos–and political fallout–from a court ruling in favor of the plaintiffs in Lobato vs. Colorado. But we have to tell you, after years of watching Colorado hover at the bottom of rankings for state education funding without hope of remedy, and listening to the bleak stories of rural school districts like the one profiled in the CPR report above…a constitutional adequacy smackdown does have its allure, folks.