Bonding bottleneck
A place where Idaho is far from the norm.
Primary elections in Idaho are not only about political parties. School districts, and the students they serve, typically have a big stake in them too.
And uneasy sit any sweeping predictions about what the voters in those districts will do.
This year, in the tally assembled by the Idaho Ed News, around the state 24 supplemental levies won voter approval, and four failed. Some plant facilities levies failed too.
Two districts, at Kimberly and Rockland, asked voters for bonding authority for building additions and renovation. Neither came close to passing; in Rockland only about a third of voters were in favor while in Kimberly only about 14% voted yes. That’s of a piece with recent history; in the last couple of years just one school bond proposal out of 15 has passed, and it succeeded only after its district (Salmon) had tried a dozen in times in a row unsuccessfully to get the money to fix some extremely unsafe and unhealthy conditions at schools there.
These different categories of funding measures - and there are more than that: Idaho’s school funding system can be, from a taxpayer’s point of view, a complicated mess - have different kinds of track records when it comes to passage. (Remember that all of them reach the ballot only after locally elected school boards sign off on them.) The money for all comes from property taxes.
These various types of levies have different rules concerning how the money is raised and how it can be used. The greatest needs often fall in the category of major building or renovations, and those improvements can make a big difference in learning and even test scores.
Education Week magazine concluded “facilities improvements such as HVAC system replacements and plumbing and furnace upgrades can lead to statistically significant test score increases equivalent to 10 percent of the gap between high- and low-income districts’ academic outcomes. In other words, the right kind of school facility upgrade can effectively close 10 percent of the academic achievement gap between high- and low-wealth school districts.”
And often to pay for those, you need bonding authority. Supplemental or plant levies often will not do the job.
And here’s the catch: While supplemental levies need for passage only a simple majority (50% of the vote plus one), and plant facilities generally need 55%, bonds need the extremely high approval bar of two-thirds of the vote - 66.7%. That’s really tough, frequently over the years a killer requirement, since each negative vote counts twice as much as every yes vote.
Idaho is a major outlier on this. A 2023 study found that while three states and the District of Columbia require no election for bonds at all, most do and require a simple majority. Those simple-majority states include Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and Oregon. Of the others, 10 states require affirmative votes of from 55% to 60%; one of those is Washington state, where the 60% requirement has been under attack by activists for years. But only Idaho requires more than that.
Lowering the threshold to 50% or maybe a little more wouldn’t, of course, guarantee bond passage. Many of them would fail anyway, as witness this year’s Rockland and Kimberly requests. But bear in mind that many of those supplemental levies, which require only a simple majority, do in fact pass.
But the proposal at least wouldn’t seem so far out of reach for so many. And you wouldn’t think, even in Idaho, that building and maintaining decent schools would be so terribly controversial.
On the other hand, take it to the Idaho Legislature and see what happens.