Face The State Staff Report
Opponents of the School Finance Transparency Act successfully lobbied to kill the bill killed on a party-line vote Thursday night, with all Democrats on the House Education Committee voting against the measure.
The vote followed a painstaking Senate debate, where the upper chamber ultimately vote to send Senate Bill 57 to the committee. The legislation would have required school districts to post a searchable version of their check registers online. While just two people testified in opposition to the measure during its time in the Senate, dozens - many paid lobbyists - showed up to testify against it in the House. Support for the legislation, meanwhile, came mostly from unpaid citizen activists and parents.
Bill sponsor Rep. Amy Stephens, R-Monument, was disheartened by the outcome. "I hear more and more from people who want and expect greater transparency in state government,” Stephens said in a release. “SB 57 would have been a major victory for taxpayers by taking us one-step closer to achieving that goal.”
Jane Urshel, executive director of the Colorado Association of School Boards, claimed putting school districts check books online would require too much extra staff time and likened it to choosing between a kindergarten teacher or an administrator. “Transparency costs money, it doesn’t save it, and we are in living in uncertain economic times,” she said.
Stephens disputed the claim, saying it would be as simple as putting an Excel spreadsheet of spending online once a quarter. The bill also gave districts two years to get organized before implementation.
Anna Bartha, president of the Falcon School Board, said her district already puts its spending online and that it only took the district’s chief financial officer “a few hours...[but the open records requests] that were coming in took an outrageous amount of time to process. Putting the check register online actually saved us time."
All Democrats on the House Education Committee are either former teachers or school board members and said this bill violated the local control of school districts. Rep. Sue Schafer, D-Wheat Ridge, called it an "unfunded mandate" and suggested further study on the best way make school spending more transparent.
During testimony in the Senate Education Committee, Sen. Ted Harvey, R-Highlands Ranch, called out Sen. Evie Hudak, D-Arvada, concerning two lunches she had with Jeffco Superintendent Cindy Stevenson that amounted to a taxpayer cost of $103. “Those are the kind of things that I think the citizens of the district need to know,” Harvey said at the time. Hudak was visibly red in the face and had no response to Harvey's revelation.
SB 57 was also the last item on the committee’s agenda for the day, and insiders speculated this was likely a tactic to get proponents of the bill to leave because they couldn’t wait around to testify. “We had a lot of people leave who had to pick kids up or have jobs,” Stephens said.