Today, Marquette Law School hosted a debate between the two candidates for Milwaukee City Attorney, Grant Langley and Pedro Colon. Mike Gousha did a great job moderating, as always, and you can listen to the webcast on MULS’ website.
The webcast is up, and when I get a few free minutes tomorrow morning, I will get an exact transcription. Meanwhile, here’s the gist of it:
During the debate, both Langley and Colon mentioned that the City Attorney serves as counsel to Milwaukee Public Schools. During the audience Q&A, then, I asked a question like, “Rep. Colon, you’ve mentioned MPS and educational equity several times. Would you aggressively file litigation to pursue broad policy changes?”
Colon responded by pledging to look for a lawsuit on behalf of MPS attacking the current school financing formula. He said we needed to vindicate the constitutional rights of K-12 students in MPS. He talked about how choice schools are shifting and increasing the financial burden on MPS.
Langley responded by saying that his office had evaluated the precedent (presumably Kukor and Vincent) and that he was meeting with MPS officials tomorrow to discuss litigation strategy.
This could be big folks. In the 2007 State Supreme Court race, Linda Clifford made a comment at a MULS/Gousha debate that she thought the Supreme Court ought to revisit education equity precedents. Today WEAC announced their endorsement of Justice Louis Butler – in 2000, WEAC filed a brief as an intervenor arguing for “sufficient resources” from the State.
This is all part of a nationwide litigation movement by teachers unions, school administrators, and professors suing for more education spending by state governments. Using state constitutional guarantees (in Wisconsin, the phrase is “as nearly as uniform as practicable”), these lawsuits ask courts to order the state to spend more – we are now generally in the “adequacy” phase of the effort.
The case of Arkansas was in the news a lot during Mike Huckabee’s campaign for president. Look at this as an example:
In 2003, the [Arkansas Supreme] Court gave the state until January 1, 2004 to perform a cost study and establish a constitutional funding system. After belated action from the legislature in June 2004 that increased state school aid by $400 million (17 percent), the court closed the case but reopened it a year later, after agreeing with plaintiffs that the 2005-2007 state budget again failed to deliver on promises made in 2004 to adequately fund schools. In the 2007 legislative session that ended this spring, the Arkansas legislature added another $122 million in state aid, on top of $82.5 million added in the 2006 session. For construction and repair of school facilities, which were also deemed inequitable in the court’s earlier rulings, the legislature authorized $120 million in 2005, an additional $50 million in 2006, and, in this year’s session, passed Act 1237, which appropriated $456 million for facilities, on top of another $220 million in facilities funding from other funding sources and other legislation that implemented procedures for state oversight of facilities construction and renovation.
This is what you get, folks. Hundreds of millions of dollars more in state spending ordered, which can only come from tax increases or cuts to other areas of the state budget. WEAC running to the State Supreme Court with an original action after every budget complaining that it wasn’t enough. The Supreme Court meddling every other year in our state education system. How much would it cost? One 2006 study by UW professors estimated that “adequacy” in Wisconsin would cost an additional $786 million, or 9.2 percent, increase in education spending statewide. A 2002 study by the Institute for Wisconsin’s future concluded that a 32% increase in spending was necessary.
It looks like either City Attorney candidate will pursue this litigation if they get the opportunity (for the record, I much prefer Langley based on today’s debate – Colon’s legal refresher should start with statutory interpretation of the law detailing the powers of the office). This is much more about the state Supreme Court race – WEAC will gladly dump a few million into GWC to get Butler elected if it means that they can get an additional $800 million annually in state spending. Taxpayers and those who care about the separation of powers should support Gableman.
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You know, one of the first things I learned in my undergraduate Administrative Law class (I haven’t taken the law school course yet) was that courts get very nervous about telling the legislature how to spend tax money. That anxiety seemed well justified to me. But apparently the Arkansas courts don’t feel that way. Great post Dan, I need to look into this more.
[...] Mar 4 2008, 06:01 PM If Daniel at the Triumvirate heard the answer right, both candidates for Milwaukee city attorney are talking about suing the [...]