By Nancy Lippe

Steve O’Mara (EdVoice), Geri Stewart (Palo Alto League of Women Voters), Carol Kuiper (Los Altos Community Foundation), Marilu Delgado, Lynette Lee Eng (Cupertino Union School District candidate) and Matt Cuson (Citizens’ Advisory Committee for Finance) work through the Next Ten budget exercise.

In groups of five or six, local community members grappled with the challenge of balancing a 10-year California state budget in last Sunday’s Community Dialogue on Education sponsored by the Los Altos Community Foundation and the Los Altos-Mountain View Area League of Women Voters. Most participants had an eye on cutting education a bigger slice of the state budget pie.

Matt Cuson, a member of the Los Altos School District’s Citizens’ Advisory Committee for Finance, noted that the group he facilitated produced a “painful” simulated budget outcome.

“The best we could do was to be mediocre,” he said, referring to his group’s attempt to raise per-pupil expenditures 15 percent above the national average by year 10. Despite his group’s consensus that the state needs to raise taxes, they could only figure out how to make enough cuts and raise enough revenue to bring education funding equal to the national average by year 10.

The Next Ten budget exercise, brainchild of leading state economist Steve Levy and local entrepreneur Noel Perry, lets citizens try their hand at balancing a 10-year state budget. Next Ten is a non-profit organization that works with schools, companies and community groups to get citizens more actively involved with - and make them more knowledgeable about - the state budget. Levy travels the state conducting budget-simulation exercises.

“As a citizenry, we share a lot, we have the same conversations and want the same things across socio-economic lines,” he said.

That thought was echoed in another small group’s conclusion that it was not that hard to

balance the budget and give education more money - if voters are willing to raise taxes. Facilitator Martin Neiman, a member of the board of directors of Bullis Charter School, said that the “citizenry could solve the state budget crisis, not special interests.”

EdVoice President and CEO Christopher Cabaldon, moderating the discussion, commented that the conversations would have been very different had each attendee been given a role, such as a party or special-interest representative, or if they, like the legislature, needed a two-thirds vote to make any changes.

Some of the more hotly debated issues were the implications of policy decisions, whether a budget surplus should go to education or to paying down the state debt, and how to make education funding more equitable.

EdVoice staff created a separate education policy decision challenge that asked participants to consider additional decision points for education spending: Should we continue spending $1.7 billion on class-size reductions, or increase teachers’ salaries by $5,000 per year for $1.5 billion? Should we add $150 million to the budget for arts and music? Can we continue spending $15 million on 10th-grade counseling and $18 million on a fruits and vegetables program? Cabaldon asked the groups to consider who benefits and who pays over the 10-year budget term and whose values are represented.

The consensus was to raise education spending to at least the national average. No consensus on how to do that was reached, although one group’s observation that it is “cheaper to educate than imprison” received an enthusiastic response. All groups, however, agreed that raising taxes to increase revenue was necessary to reach their goals for education. Taxes discussed included income, sales, car, gas and property taxes.

Next Ten’s California Budget Challenge simulation program takes citizens through seven spending and six revenue categories, each offering extensive background information, policy options and the advantages and disadvantages of policy option. The program automatically calculates the budget total and deficit or surplus for each category.

The groups found the program easy to use and provocative for discussion. The California Budget Challenge can be found on the Next Ten Web site, www.next-ten.org.

Links to the budget challenge and the EdVoice Web site, as well as information about upcoming Community Dialogues, can be found at www.community

dialogues.org.