The hostility is built up of years of expecting each new increase to be the last, and yet continuing to receive urgent demands for more, all with the plaintive "for our schools and our children" exhortations that try to suggest only an absolute monster would dare to say "enough".
If this system were used in USA, our shameless politicians would regularly just completely fail to fund schools. The fact that some money goes directly to schools means that most of them can at least keep the lights on.
One of many ways in which local government here is fucked up.
I am sure some fake-libertarian HNer who wants the shrink government to the size of a bathtub drain will tell me I am wrong.
Taxpayers have a real blind spot to the whole 'money is fungible' concept.
The political promise is usually "Hey, we'll implement a lottery and earmark 100% of the taxes towards education -- that'll be $20 million a year!" to which everybody thinks that $20 million will be added to the $30 million already being spent. But what happens is the $20 million lottery gets added, then the $20 million non-earmarked funds get pulled to pay for <insert other thing here>, such that the schools don't end up with any more or less than they had.
Past that, "earmarked for schools" is also a way to reframe over political opponents against the lottery as "voting against education".
> A fund is hereby established in the State Treasury, to be known as the 2016 State School Facilities Fund
> no disbursement shall be made from any funds required by law to be transferred to the General Fund.
> Bonds in the total amount of nine billion dollars ($9,000,000,000) […] may be issued and sold for the purposes set forth…
(This proposition was approved by the voters.)
Thus the schools are receiving the $y, just as promised. Only they aren't any better off, and the general fund has an extra $y in it now.
Property values (and therefore property tax receipts) vary relatively modestly with the economic cycle, but income tax receipts are fully exposed to the booms and busts of the stock market. What this leads to is school funding that is somewhat directly tied to the financial markets :( So if you're in school during a recession, it sucks
I'm sure there's a ton of good-sounding legal reasons for it, but seriously?!
The legislation discussed in the article is largely about making Sunnyvale (and the rest of the job-heavy housing-light peninsula cities) build more housing.
For example there's a new development in Fremont of a few hundred houses: the school district had to zone it as "we'll provide school for you, but it'll be wherever we have space across the entire city." That's not good.
To me the idiocy is this: the state government mandates that all cities build new housing. But they don't mandate that housing and jobs balance. A city like Fremont was master-planned with enough space for both, but is being forced by the state to build houses instead for people who will work in Sunnyvale which has too many jobs and not enough houses.