Lacking Due Diligence

Yesterday the Anne Arundel County Board of Education rubber stamped Superintendent Kevin Maxwell's spending plan, including his proposed 19% budget increase everybody wants to raise taxes to pay for.

This is the most unsurprising development:

But school board member Victor Bernson called the $153 million operating budget increase "grossly extravagant." He voted against the plan, along with Michael Leahy.

"I believe the message this board is sending to the good citizens of Anne Arundel County is that we can spend, spend, spend our way out of our present challenges," Mr. Bernson said. "I could not disagree more."

And he's right. It is unsurprising that Vic Bernson and Mike Leahy are the only votes of reason on the Board when it comes to spending proposals, because they are the only ones who have been discussing the issue in realistic terms. The other Board members have adopted the attitude that when it comes to spending, the Superintendent gets whatever her wants.

I wonder if the same attitude would be in play if Eric Smith were still the Superintendent. Board members were much, much more willing to challenge him.

Nevertheless, the Board has now basically passed the buck onto the County Executive and the County Council when it comes to matters of the budget. It is astounding to think that the majority of the Board took the Superintendent's budget as it was and rubber stamped its approval. It is amazing to think that the other members could not find one single solitary item to adjust, much less cut.

The real irony about passing the buck on to elected leaders is that one of the arguments against electing the Board of Education is that by electing its members, the Board is being made political. Of course, that makes the naive assumption that the Board now is not already political. Board Members and the Superintendent both made public pronouncements about taxes in recent months, as we have documented. That is clearly a political action for the political arena. Two sitting Board members unsuccessfully ran for the House of Delegates as Democrats in 2006. And now, the entire Board (save for Messrs. Bernson and Leahy) have passed the buck for the budget onto the politicians, bringing the entire school budget under the klieg lights of the County Council.

Maybe, just maybe, if the Board members had been elected as opposed to appointed, they would have taken the time to review the budget, discussed the budget, and proposed a few changes to the budget. That's not saying that elected members would not have supported the budget; they might have. But I do think that an accountable, elected school board would have performed the due diligence in the budget process that was sorely lacking here in 2007...