Editorial: Sidelines are wrong place for local leaders in property tax debates

It was unsettling on several levels to hear Gov. Bruce Rauner say this week that he's open to having suburban schools pay more toward teacher pension costs if lawmakers will consider his proposals to give local schools more control over negotiations with their employee unions.

One's immediate inclination is to react with alarm at the sudden burden that would be shifted to local schools already getting little enough help from the state. But another discomfort lurks even deeper beneath the surface of this debate - as well as the entire discussion of a property tax freeze that remains at the core of the state's budget impasse. Where are the suburbs in all this talk?

It must be said, certainly, that lawmakers such as Republicans Sen. Matt Murphy, of Palatine, and Rep. David Harris, of Arlington Heights, have pressed the cause of suburban schools and municipalities that will have to manage the consequences of tax freezes and pension-cost shifts. And local officials have had opportunities to address the legislature and press their cases.

But ultimately, the situation reduces to a debate in which the local school and municipal officials who are elected to oversee the levying and disbursal of local property taxes can only watch from the sidelines as state lawmakers who have no accountability on the taxes wheel and deal over the issues that affect them - and prepare to welcome political credit for anything that may appear to have "held the line."

And that uncomfortable circumstance follows a path of logic to a perhaps even more disquieting conclusion, one that state leaders have wrestled with repeatedly for decades but consistently shelved - that addressing our funding inequities requires a deeper, more comprehensive solution than anything we've been willing or able to muster so far.

Yes, it does defy logic that the state would pay $800 million a year toward suburban and downstate teachers' pensions and not a dime toward those of Chicago. Likewise, as Murphy has pointed out, it makes no sense that Chicago schools get $700 million in state aid to help poor students while suburban schools, which have increasing issues of poverty of their own to deal with, get nothing.

Whatever its flaws or merits, Rauner's union proposal is one attempt to deal with school funding at a systemic level. So, for that matter, is Democratic Senate President John Cullerton's effort to force lawmakers to change the school aid formula. Unfortunately, even these efforts have been tangled up in the brinkmanship and partisanship of political expedience, leaving officials at the local level capable only of, in Harris's words, "looking at what Springfield is doing and saying 'We have to prepare for the actions that Springfield may well take.'"

Presumably, the brink will soon appear in the headlamps for lawmakers and the governor and they will steer toward some sort of solution to the current budget impasse. We hope whatever it is will provide more time to reflect on the effects of Rauner's proposals for restricting unions, and, counting on the House to show better judgment next week than the Senate showed Wednesday, we hope it will not include the arbitration law he has vetoed. But ultimately, it will do little more than solve immediate problems with minimal accountability to the people who will be directly affected.

So, the sooner it is behind us, the better. Then, we can and must begin the harder work of providing not just expedient appearances of fairness, but true intrinsic equity in which the people who are accountable for managing local tax money have the authority to do it.