Toledo School District Superintendent Chris Rust stands in front of one of the many partitioned classrooms adjacent to the high school's library during a tour in January 2017. The district successfully passed a bond this year, but not before several failures to reach the 60 percent threshold.
The 60 percent supermajority requirement to pass school bonds is “not democracy,” and it’s time for state legislators to make it fair for districts to update and improve their buildings, said Castle Rock Superintendent Jim Mabbott.
Mabbott is one of 30 school superintendents in Southwest Washington asking state legislators for a constitutional amendment to drop the voter approval requirements for school bonds to a simple 50 percent majority.
“There is no candidate in this state, including state legislators, who need 60 percent to be able to win,” Mabbott said. He added that “it’s very difficult to argue that the minority of voters should decide what happens” in an election.
Democrats this week introduced bills into both houses that would drop the supermajority requirement, but they face long odds. They need two-thirds majorities in both the House and Senate. Even though Democrats hold majorities in both houses, their margins aren’t enough to pass an amendment without bipartisan support.
The amendment also would need simple majority approval by all Washington voters. In recent years, though, voters in this state have been more apt to make it harder to raise taxes than to make it easier, as shown by the overwhelming approval of the 2014 Tim Eyman initiative to require a two-thirds legislative vote for all tax increases (it was declared unconstitutional in 2016).
Historically, Republicans have opposed similar measures, said Sen. Dean Takko, D-Longview, who supports this year’s bill.
Jami Lund, senior policy analyst for the Freedom Foundation, said the supermajority requirement helps protect taxpayers from a school district “obligating people for decades” to pay back the loans of their predecessors. (The think tank group has not yet taken a formal stance on the bills for looser requirements.)
State Rep. Jim Walsh, an Aberdeen Republican whose district includes much of Cowlitz County, opposes the amendment. The supermajority requirement, he says “forces school districts to make a real strong case about why they need your money.”
The Washington State Parent Teacher Association reported that only 46 percent of the school bond proposals put before voters between 2006 and 2017 passed. Those odds were in play in Castle Rock last year, when the district’s first proposed bond measure in more than 20 years failed despite receiving a 55 percent “yes” vote in April. The Longview district faced a similar circumstance in November 2017, when it fell just short of passing a $121 million bond even though the measure received 58 percent of the vote.
Most politicians consider winning 55 percent of the vote a “landslide victory,” Mabbott said. But for the school district, that same number meant failure.
“We felt defeated after a ‘landslide victory.’ We couldn’t build any buildings after a ‘landslide victory,’ “ Mabbott said.
The constitutional “supermajority” requirement dates back to the Great Depression and World War II, according to the Seattle Times. Economic hardship and concern that war-time workers would move away from local cities and leave the local residents to pay for levies and bonds ultimately led to a 1944 constitutional amendment putting the supermajority threshold in place.
Districts have been fighting the state to change it back for years. The supermajority requirement was dropped in 2007 for regular maintenance and operations levies after more than a decade of discussion.
And now educators are back at the plate to advocate for less stringent bond passage requirements.
“It just makes sense that it would be a (simple) majority like everything else,” said Longview Superintendent Dan Zorn.
Takko agreed that districts should be allowed to build new schools “if a strong majority of people want that.”
“A lot of schools are in some pretty sad shape, that were built years ago and really need to be updated,” Takko said. “There are people who don’t like taxes. I don’t like paying them any more than the next guy, but we have to have a society that functions, and one of the ways we do that is to have education that functions.”
Rich Wood, spokesperson for the state teachers union, said educators support dropping the bond threshold. For them, it means eliminating the barriers districts face when improving school safety, he said.
“It’s an outdated requirement when we look at the needs students have today. ... We need to have safe, modernized school facilities and school buildings for our students,” Wood said. “If the ceiling is caving in on them and it’s moldy or wet or cold ... then that’s a problem. Students need to be safe so they can focus on learning.”
