Our Opinion: No on Measure 62
Friday, October 24, 2008 11:17 AM PDT
The basic premise of Measure 62 — channeling more money to law enforcement agencies in Oregon — is a good one.
But this measure, designed to amend the Oregon Constitution regarding where a percentage of lottery funds goes — misses the mark, and voters should reject it.
The Measure 62 blueprint hinges on a plan to compel the state to funnel 15 percent of net lottery funds from the general fund into a “public safety fund.”
Half of that money would then be disbursed to individual counties in Oregon to fuel childhood programs, operations for district attorneys and investigations by sheriff’s departments. The other half of the money would be funneled to the Oregon State Police for criminal probes and forensic duties.
All well and good, right? After all, police in many areas of the state, including Malheur County, face a constant funding shortage with growing public safety obligations.
But this amendment is tricky because it would likely come with a major trade-off — school funding, which receives a large share of the general fund budget. One can criticize the state of public education in Oregon and the absolute lack of oversight regarding the dollars shoveled into schools each year. One can even stand back and complain the return on the money spent — student achievement — is, in some places, woefully inadequate.
Those criticisms all carry a certain amount of validity, but this measure is a ramshackle response to the ongoing problem of funding public safety. The oversight issues with public spending in education and properly funding aspects of law enforcement are issues lawmakers should tackle. Shuffling this issue off to voters, as appears to be the case here, is a cop out.
Further, amending the Constitution is a very serious endeavor and should be considered only in the direst circumstances.
The measure has picked up plenty of support from district attorneys in Oregon, and no wonder. If passed, the measure would be a virtual cornucopia of funds that would seemingly solve all the fiscal problems haunting the state public safety apparatus.
That is a wonderful idea but hardly true.
Lottery funding — which generates $700 million a year — is already earmarked by the State Legislature for items in the general fund such as parks and an education reserve account.
This plan would permanently send at least $100 million the first year, with the amount to increase in following years depending on state lottery revenues, to law enforcement and district attorneys offices, but it would do so by needlessly hampering education funding. It also removes the State Legislature’s ability to decide how a significant chunk of the general fund should be spent based on priorities and needs in any given biennium.
There needs to be some changes to how the state allocates its education funding and the level of oversight regarding the spending, as well as how much priority is given to public safety.
But streamlining an existing system is different than permanently pulling the funding rug out from under those who need it most — students.
