Impact Aid: Another Fleecing
Kurtz, Howie
Impact Aid: Another Fleecing by Howie Kurtz Washington is full of programs that serve little p- urp- ose , and President Carter is constantly proclaiming his deep antipathy for government...
...Within three days, Rep...
...This is because impact aid’s sponsors, in their wisdom, have seen to it that 400 of the 435 congressional districts receive at least some money from the program...
...Public schools are usually financed through property taxes...
...The second provision effectively de-fanged the first...
...Somebody leaked a copy of the plan to The Washington Star, which ran a story that triggered a predictable outcry...
...Perhaps the nicest thing that can be said about impact aid is that it keeps a growing number of bureaucrats off the jobless rolls...
...He went ahead and proposed a $76 million cut in next year’s impact aid by phasing out the money for federal employees who live in one school district but work in another...
...Every federal dollar spent on schools or rehabilitation in Phoenix or Dallas for political reasons will mean less money for places like Newark and the South Bronx...
...This kind of dilution may get bills passed, but it means our new urban policy will be nothing more than just general revenue sharing...
...Califano wanted to move much more quickly on taking the commuters out of the program, knocking out a major portion of next year’s estimated $823 million in impact aid, With the savings, he said, the government could “meet other educational needs such as those of the handicapped and disadvantaged...
...In short, the number of federal employees living there has no real impact on the local tax money available for Fairfax’s public schools, but the schools get a tremendous amount of impact money...
...Thus a school district full of federal employees who own homes and pay property taxes still gets impact aid...
...Play to Their Self-Interest One way around this problem is to play to the congressmen’s self-interest...
...The aid could be phased out over a couple of years while the schools looked for ways to make up the difference...
...Califano remains optimistic that he can sell these reforms to a hostile Congress simply because they make sense...
...The computerized printout of how the aid is distributed runs over 300 pages...
...As Hams says, “the pro38 gram has a lot of support, because it does reach into so many school districts...
...Every President since Harry Truman has tried to scrap the program, and every year Congress has dug in its heels and refused to go along...
...This problem is especially severe for the military in wartime, but it’s also evident today-for example, in the District of Columbia, where the vast amount of space taken up by tax-free buildings means the schools are woefully underfinanced...
...The survival of a program like impact aid is a testament to congressmen’s inclination to vote only in the narrow self-interest of their districts, but with more effort they might be persuaded to do otherwise this time...
...A solid bloc of intransigent congressmen can be a bigger obstacle to reform than the most vehement unions and special interest lobbies...
...But now that Califano is calling for those funds to help the disadvantaged, liberals have shed the cloak of principle and are fighting for more bucks for the folks back home...
...Therefore the school district is saddled with a huge increase in students without any offsetting increase in revenues...
...Any policy based on reason would have to recognize that schools in Cleveland and Detroit are in far more desperate shape than those in the suburbs of Washington...
...A classic case in point is a program known formally as School Assistance to Federally Affected Areas, and informally as impact aid...
...So the school districts with the most federal employees get the most impact aid, even though these districts are often among the richest in the country already...
...For example, the administration has been working for months on an “urban policy” that was intended to revitalize the ailing cities of the Northeast and Midwest, but the President has become convinced that such a plan won’t wash, politically, on Capitol Hill...
...The reason Califano and Carter seem unable to get rid of impact aid is, simply, self-interest politics...
...But there’s one catch in the program that makes it almost completely nonsensical today: the aid is parceled out to school districts according to how many government employees live in them, regardless of whether the school districts are being deprived of property tax money...
...Fairfax County, Virginia, a Washington suburb with a median family income of about $28,000, gets more than $13 million a year in impact aid...
...Worried school officials started calling their congressmen...
...There are suburban counties like Montgomery and Fairfax surrounding every major city in the country...
...The impact aid system is also unbelievably complex: there are 23 different ways a school district can qualify for various kinds of payments...
...The letter warned the administration against “shirking its responsibility for the impact of the federal presence on our local public schools...
...We think we can come up with something rational and defensible...
...It’s an incredible morass,” says one insider...
...His reasoning is that a county like Fairfax has many federal employees living in it, but almost all of them pay property taxes...
...if a military base is built in a school district all of its personnel will send their children to the public schools there, but they won’t be paying property taxes...
...Impact aid is money the government pays to the “impacted” school districts, to make up for this imbalance between students and revenues and to bring the affected schools up to normal financing levels...
...Many of their parents commute to jobs in large cities that have deteriorating schools where discipline takes precedence over education...
...Fairfax County’s $13-million grant, for instance, is only five per cent of its total school budget...
...Few would argue that the federal rug should be suddenly pulled out from under school districts that have relied on impact aid for many years...
...Defense contractors keep needless weapons programs going...
...The latest effort to reform impact aid is the brainchild of Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano, who has proposed to stop paying impact money to districts where federal employees live but don’t work...
...Impact aid was created with the best of intentions during World War 11, to solve a small crisis the war had Howie Kurtz is an investigative reporter for columnist Jack Anderson...
...As Senator William Proxmire, one of the few politicians who has fol_tght against impact aid in Congress, says, “This simply can’t be justified as national policy...
...Even in areas that are shortchanged, any congressman who dares oppose the program is virtually certain to hear from angry school officials who are counting on their share of the federal money...
...So it would seem, logically, that this would be a time when the useless activities of the federal government were rapidly falling by the wayside...
...On the other hand, the entire state of Wisconsin, with a median income of about $10,000, gets only $3 million a year...
...Carter therefore decided to broaden his urban aid formula to include the newer, more affluent cities of the Sunbelt in order to attract enough votes to pass it...
...The other way out of the dilemma of self-interest politics is to build enough pressure to overcome it...
...As the pressure continued to rise, any congressman who was leaning toward voting with Califano probably decided it was more trouble than it was worth...
...It’s a ridiculous way to run a program...
...These suburbs have, for the most part, modern, efficient school systems financed by local property taxes and populated largely by white middleclass students...
...That’s unlikely to help Califano much, though...
...When the beneficiaries of misguided government largesse are politically strong, which they often are, they can usually make sure that the program that helps them stays alive regardless of its merits...
...No federal government building has to pay property taxes (as private buildings do), and military personnel who live on bases don’t own houses and so don’t pay property taxes either...
...Impact aid was designed to serve a real purpose more than 30 years ago, but now it’s largely a form of welfare for the rich...
...Under the Republicans, they could argue that they were just trying to save some badly needed aid to education from the conservative budget ax...
...There is no political benefit in opposing a program that most people have never heard of and much risk of incurring the wrath of its beneficiaries...
...But Califano, who doesn’t have to run for reelection this year, didn’t buckle under the pressure...
...Califano did try to soften the blow by promising that every district would get 75 per cent of the aid it received last year, thus delaying the inevitable for a few years...
...If Jimmy Carter doesn’t make an issue out of impact aid, however, the congressmen will go about their business as usual, the program will survive, and nobody outside of the Washington area will know the difference...
...Prince George’s County and Montgomery County, Maryland, both also well-off Washington suburbs, get $10 million and $6 million respectively...
...36 thousands of military personnel and other government employees were being moved around the country according to the dictates of the war planners in Washington...
...The Maryland and Virginia suburbs alone would have lost about $5 million next year...
...Cleveland collects just $828,000...
...Buffalo, $350,000...
...Why should a steelworker in Buffalo, for instance, pay part of his hardearned salary for a federal program that hands out $13 million to Fairfax County, Virginia, but only $350,000 to the decaying schools that his own children attend...
...Because impact aid has a constituency, in other words, its survival doesn’t depend on whether or not it’s a good program...
...One thing these influxes of people would upset in communities was public school systems...
...and Jersey City, $263,000...
...Herbert Harris, a second-term liberal Democrat from Fairfax County (and, like the other Washington-area congressmen, a skillful saboteur of any bill that might hurt federal employees) got 75 of his colleagues to sign a letter condemning the proposal...
...It’s perfectly clear that it isn’t going to be easy,” admits HEW spokeswoman Eileen Shanahan...
...Milwaukee, $398,000...
...Some congressmen are hard pressed to justify the program now that a Democratic administration is calling it unfair...
...federal employees remain impervious to firing even for gross incompetence...
...But instead of using the meat-ax approach to cutting up the program, we’re trying to use a scalpel...
...They are likely to work in the District of Columbia, so there aren’t many taxexempt government office buildings in Fairfax either...
...If the President really pushes a worthy cause like abolishing impact aid, if politicians who remain intransigent are made to look simply greedy, if the press, and in turn the public, overcomes its indifference and becomes aroused, then it’s possible to achieve change undiluted by political buyoffs...
...Impact Aid: Another Fleecing by Howie Kurtz Washington is full of programs that serve little p- urp- ose , and President Carter is constantly proclaiming his deep antipathy for government waste...
...That isn’t the case, of course...
...The Carter administration has tried to do away with the program’s most unfair aspects, but so far to no availthe people it helps may be undeserving, but they’re very powerful and very reluctant to give up their special little deal...
...It’s very hard to push anything through Congress that will mean less money for a lot of members’ districts-and it’s much easier to pass a new program if it offers a little something to a majority of congressmen...
...Military lobbies like the Retired Officers Association began firing salvos...
...Unless the White House makes a concerted push to cut back impact aid, which seems unlikely, the program will probably stay intact as a simple giveaway to federal employees...
...Communities might have huge influxes of troops taking up temporary residence...
...Several studies have shown that most school districts could replace their impact aid with only a slight increase in property taxes...
...Congress made a half-hearted attempt to deal with this situation in 1974, deciding to phase out aid to the home districts of federal commuters but also to guarantee that each district would receive at least 90 per cent of the money it got the year before...
...social workers keep welfare programs a mess...
...The White House approved Califano’s plan, but its opponents were already hard at work trying to kill it...
...Reforming government is extremely difficult because even the worst program helps somebody, albeit perhaps somebody undeserving...
Vol. 10 • March 1978 • No. 1
