School-reserve limits should be scrapped, not fixed

There’s a saying among Capitol insiders about legislation: You shouldn’t amend a bad bill.

The impeccable logic behind the adage is that if a measure’s premise is faulty, amendments can’t fix it, but could mask its failings. The wisdom of that advice has been proven too many times to count, with legislators often forced year after year to revisit a law that shouldn’t have been enacted in the first place.

The ill-starred energy “deregulation” measure in 1996 and an irresponsible public pension sweetener in 1999 are two classic examples – hastily written and secretly passed with only cursory glances of potential downsides.

Senate Bill 858 was – and is – another bad bill, imposing politically motivated and arbitrary limits on school district budget reserves. And three years after its hasty passage in 2014, legislators are still trying to fix it. True to the axiom, while fiddling might make it more acceptable to some, as well as more complicated, it’s still very bad policy.

SB 858 was a prototypical “mushroom bill” that sprouted in darkness as a so-called “trailer bill” to the 2014-15 budget, containing dozens of provisions relating to public education. No. 27 of those provisions clamped limits on school district reserves if voters passed a pending ballot measure, sponsored by Gov. Jerry Brown, to create a state budget “rainy day fund” that would cushion the effects of an economic downturn, and if the state shifted any money, even $1, into another reserve fund for education.

It was entirely irrational – limiting the ability of school districts to protect themselves from the same adverse impacts the ballot measure, Proposition 2, sought to mitigate at the state level.

It was obvious why Brown wanted the legislation. He feared the California Teachers Association would oppose Proposition 2 because putting money in reserve could limit funds available for salary increases. SB 858’s school reserve language placated the CTA by potentially making more money available for salaries.

Proposition 2 passed and the school reserve limits became law. Authorities said its limits were unlikely to be triggered – and they haven’t been. Moreover, with modifications, school districts can pretty much avoid the limits even if they are triggered. But imposing arbitrary limits still grates on some local school officials.

Those limits should be repealed. But instead of repealing SB 858, or at least provision No. 27, the Legislature is trying to fix it. AB 235, carried by Assemblyman Patrick O’Donnell, D-Long Beach, would revise the conditions under which the reserve limits would be triggered, soften the limits and exempt more than 400 districts altogether.

Those exempted districts, of course, support the bill, which whipped through the Assembly Education Committee, chaired by O’Donnell.

Chances are, AB 235 will pass and be signed into law by Brown. But it just complicates a piece of political policy that shouldn’t have been enacted in the first place. It tries to fix a bad bill.

This story was originally published March 28, 2017 at 10:23 AM with the headline "School-reserve limits should be scrapped, not fixed."