Education groups to renew efforts at tax on rich to fund education

Education activists said Monday they will try again to ask voters to tax Arizona’s richest to pay for public education. 

The proposed Invest in Education Act is estimated to raise $1 billion a year, half of which will go to pay teachers and other school personnel. Twenty five percent will go towards hiring support staff, 10% towards mentoring and retention, 12% for establishing a career training and workforce fund, and the remaining 3% will go toward the Arizona Teachers Academy Fund.

The Arizona Supreme Court threw the first iteration off the ballot in 2018, stirring up a lot of public scrutiny with its 5-2 split decision that was leaked before it was made public. The court ruled that the “description of the initiative’s principal provisions omitted material provisions and created a significant danger of confusion or unfairness to those who signed petitions to place the measure on the ballot.”

The 2018 version also sought to raise only about $700 million a year. 

At Monday’s announcement, Arizona Education Association President Joe Thomas said the groups pushing the initiative had thought about including a sales tax increase to woo those who opposed the 2018 effort, but decided on just taxing the top earners.  

“We looked at a lot of different revenue streams,” Thomas said, just three hours before Gov. Doug Ducey kicked off the 2020 legislative session with his State-of-the-State address.  

If AEA would have gone the route to increase the sales tax, they would have lost some support from Democrats, including Sen. Martin Quezada. 

Quezada told Arizona Capitol Times in November he thought a sales tax is “regressive” since it targets lower income earners. He thought it was just an attempt to get those opposed to come on board, but didn’t think it would likely work. 

“People who are opposed to it are going to be opposed no matter what,” Quezada said at the time.

Thomas said the possibility also still exists for the Legislature to pass a referendum. 

“We would love to run a referral through the Legislature,” Thomas said. It would all come down to having the votes, but Thomas said they will do any approach to bypass Ducey. 

“I think [Ducey’s] boxed himself in with this ‘no tax pledge,’ that’s fine. If he doesn’t want to be part of the solution, he can do other things,” Thomas said, adding that he has heard from voters that this is the way to go about funding education. 

Republicans in the Legislature are still expected to attempt a sales tax increase. Sen. Kate Brophy McGee, R-Phoenix, introduced a resolution to hike the 0.6-cent sales tax to a full penny, providing funds for universities and community colleges as well as K-12 education.

Approved in 2000, Prop. 301 appropriates roughly $667 million annually from the state sales tax to fund K-12 schools, universities, community colleges and others. The tax was set to expire in 2021 until the Legislature extended it until 2041 on the ballot two years ago.

David Lujan, director of the Arizona Center for Economic Progress, said at Monday’s announcement that if Prop. 301 does have an expansion effort that goes to the ballot as a competing measure to fund K-12, they aren’t too worried based on what he says Arizona voters want.

“Voters are fatigued with sales tax … our Legislature has cut taxes every single year since 1990 and most of those have not been for everyday Arizonans,” he said. “In our polling, Arizonans overwhelmingly support this tax proposal.” 

In 2018, the Invest in Education Act collected 270,000 signatures when it only needed 150,642 of registered voters.

The initiative will be using Petition Partners to gather the signatures necessary.