“Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.”

John Godfrey Saxe, 19th century American poet.

If ever there was a year the above quote can describe the legislative process at the state capitol, this is the one. So many ideas are being ground up into legislation that one has to turn away from time to time to avoid becoming ill.

The problem is that things are moving so quickly it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on. It has not been a pretty sight to watch some of the goings-on in halls of the Statehouse.

The main focus, of course, has been money. The state of Vermont is facing a projected $150 million shortfall in its next budget year, and legislators are trying to find ways to close the gap. In so many ways, so much of the sausage grinding starts and ends with dollars and cents.

Take education funding, and the related statewide property tax. So many ideas have been floated that it has been hard to keep track of them all: school consolidation, redistricting, cost shifts, caps on school budgets, to name a few. All to keep school spending down, in essence so monies raised can be used to offset other state expenses.

Is that right? The town of Dover doesn’t think so. In a letter released Thursday morning, the town select and school boards have called on the Legislature to keep monies raised by the statewide property tax in the state’s education fund, as required by law.

Seems simple, doesn’t it? Well, like sausage, the statewide property tax actually has a lot of things ground into it. Much of it isn’t pretty. Aside from the statewide property tax, there are other monies that go into the pool of education dollars. Revenues from lottery sales, for example, and other more general taxes are also used to fund education. Regardless of whether education property tax revenues are shifted out of the education fund, it is very clear that there will be less money from other sources shifted into the fund. And that, to us, is where the real rub is. The Legislature will not live up to its obligation to fully fund the education fund, and in fact has not lived up to it for the past few years.

Whether or not Dover is right or wrong, wins or loses the argument, what is clear to us is that the current education funding model is broken. We have said many times that until the Legislature defines by law what a basic, equal education is, no funding formula will stand the test of time.

As it stands right now, the state sends a set amount of money to school districts for all expenses, regardless of what those costs may be. High school sports, for example, are part of that sausage. While we are big fans of high school sports, we really question whether or not statewide education funds should pay for any of it. Let the local school districts raise that money over and above what a basic education costs, and pay for athletics strictly out of local funds.

Until the leaders in Montpelier shift the discussion from how the state pays for education to what the state pays for, we will always have fights over funds. Until leaders show enough backbone to take on the hard issues of what constitutes a basic, equalized education, we will never get beyond where we are now.

In the meantime, we’ll still have plenty of sausage.