OK Institutions Against Taxpayer's Bill of Rights
Shannon Muchmore, Managing Editor
The Daily O'Collegian
April 12, 2006
Higher education institutions in Oklahoma continue to campaign against the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights by
citing horror stories from the bill’s influence on Colorado higher education in the late 1990s and early
2000s.
“You look at the experience with the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights in Colorado and what it did to higher
education and it will just scare you to death,” said Oklahoma Sen. Mike Morgan, D—Stillwater.
The bill tightens limits on the growth of government to provide tax relief for citizens. In November,
Colorado voters suspended a similar bill after a state recession left state agencies, including universities,
struggling for financing.
A group called Oklahomans In Action recently gathered enough signatures to potentially get the bill on
the ballot in Oklahoma as soon as November.
Steve Golding, former vice president for administration and finance at the University of Colorado, said
TABOR put inescapable restraints on financing at the university.
Higher education appropriations decreased from 20.3 percent in 1990 to 10.5 percent in 2004, according
to a 2003 report Golding’s office prepared.
“(The report) basically showed that if there was no changes made to TABOR and events were just
allowed to take their course, that eventually there would be no money left in the state budget for higher
education,” Golding said.
He said the problems were fundamental to how the bill worked.
“Even the proponents of TABOR understood that the law, the way it was officially constructed, had a fatal
flaw,” Golding said.
Mike Osburn, state director for Americans for Prosperity, said TABOR did not harm higher education in
Colorado.
“Obviously, when people are opposed to something like TABOR, they’re going to pick out the worst
possible scenarios,” he said. “It is not my impression that TABOR caused any more of a cutback in higher
education than it did anywhere else in state government.”
Osburn said Oklahoma’s version of the bill is different from Colorado’s. It eliminates the ratchet effect,
which ties state budgets to population growth and actual expenditures, instead of allowable
expenditures. The ratchet effect has been widely criticized as the downfall of Colorado’s TABOR.
Morgan said the changes in Oklahoma’s bill don’t convince him that TABOR is a good idea.
“Pardon me if I don’t have a lot of faith in you saying ‘oh we fixed it,’” Morgan said. “I mean, if I had a
nickel for every time I’ve heard that in this building I’d have a big pile of nickels.”
OSU Provost Marlene Strathe said eliminating the ratchet effect wouldn’t fix TABOR because the bill is
fundamentally flawed.
“I think everyone, not just OSU, in higher education is very concerned about the possibility of a passage
of legislation such as TABOR,” Strathe said.
Strathe was provost at the University of Northern Colorado from 1998 to 2003 and saw negative effects
from that state’s bill. She said her academic budget decreased 25 percent in 18 months.
“It meant things like reducing travel, reducing expenditures at the library, hiring fewer faculty or hiring
none at all,” she said.
A poll the Associated Press conducted this past month showed 86 out of 148 Oklahoma legislators
oppose TABOR and 45 are undecided.
Osburn said the passage of TABOR is realistic despite legislators’ objections because public opinion is
favorable.
“I have a friend whose grandfather used to say: ‘That’s a crazy idea. Nobody will support it but the
people,’” Osburn said. “I think that’s what the deal is here with TABOR.”
Colorado’s ranking in higher education appropriations per capita dropped from 31st to 48th in the nation
while TABOR was in effect, according to a report from the Oklahoma City-based nonprofit Citizen’s Policy
Center.
Higher education’s share of Colorado’s budget went from 20 percent in 1990 to 10 percent in 2004,
according to the report.
This has generated a full-scale crisis in the higher education market by “deteriorating facilities,
skyrocketing tuition and fleeing faculty,” according to the report.
The OSU Faculty Council passed a resolution earlier this year stating TABOR would be bad for Oklahoma
education and the state in general.
The Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, although not allowed to use public money to oppose
TABOR, resolved the bill “could possibly perpetuate the under-funding of higher education to the
detriment of Oklahoma’s future.”
A report by University of Central Oklahoma’s Policy Institute showed “if TABOR had been in place in
Oklahoma in 1992, Oklahoma’s tax revenues would have grown at one of the slowest rates in the
nation.”
Morgan said he assumes the measure will be on the ballot at some point in Oklahoma’s future and he will
campaign strongly against it.
“There’s got to be an education process taking place in this state so people don’t go out and support this
just because of the name,” he said. “Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights sounds like something good, but it is
something very, very bad.”
