A legislator said Tuesday that the House and Senate Education committees' process for figuring out how to spend more than $3 billion on public schools is not adequately open to input from interested lawmakers.
The committees have been holding joint "working group" meetings -- usually posted on the online legislative calendar -- in which members have broken into groups and discussed their recommendations for a report that will help determine funding for public school districts for kindergarten through 12th grade.
Lawmakers not on the committees have not been allowed to speak or sit at the table with committee members during those meetings, but Rep. Reginald Murdock, D-Marianna, said Tuesday that interested nonmembers should be allowed to participate.
"We need to have everybody at the table. This is a very serious and lengthy discussion," he said at Tuesday's meeting. "At some point, we're going to have to stop limiting ... or there's going to be a crash."
Both the full House and Senate must vote on the joint education committees' report during the regular session that starts in January, he noted.
But Rep. Bruce Cozart, R-Hot Springs, said the committee would get nowhere if all 135 lawmakers had a say in the report. He is co-chairman of the joint committee.
"We would never get it done if we had everybody sitting at the table," Cozart said.
Lawmakers and others are welcome to attend the "working group" meetings, and all lawmakers ultimately do get a vote during the regular session, he noted.
"Working group" meetings were held Monday morning and listed on the legislative calendar, but that evening, the education committees held another such meeting that was not posted. It had been announced at the end of a regularly scheduled joint education meeting earlier that day.
Discussions Monday night centered on whether and to what extent school employees should receive a cost-of-living wage increase or if a higher level of state support for employee insurance premiums would be a better use of funds, Cozart said.
He reminded committee members during Tuesday's regularly scheduled meeting that a meeting had occurred the night before and a handful of lawmakers had attended in addition to at least two representatives from Gov. Asa Hutchinson's office.
"My deal is that I want it to be transparent and open," Cozart said afterward. "It was kind of done in secret before and I don't know the ones that worked on it before, but the meetings were never held at the Capitol. They were held off site and a selected few worked on them."
The joint education committees' adequacy report is required by a series of Arkansas Supreme Court rulings that addressed inequities in funding Arkansas' schools.
The report is due to be complete by mid-October, but no recommendations discussed during the "working group" meetings are yet included in the full committee's draft.
During Tuesday's meeting, Rep. John Walker, D-Little Rock, told the committee he would probably not sign onto the report because he did not expect the committee's decision to provide for equal funding across the state.
"It's clear that the schools in Arkansas are unequal and they provide unequal education and unequal facilities and wealth is the determinant of adequacy and poverty in the norm for the rest," he said. "The inequalities are enormous and growing. They are not being narrowed district to district."
House Minority Leader Rep. Michael John Gray, D-Augusta, asked if there was an upper limit to the amount of funding "that the [Education] Department or the governor's office is saying" the committee could recommend.
During a news conference in July, Hutchinson was asked if decisions regarding educational adequacy could affect his plans for an income tax cut.
"The result of the adequacy committee is extraordinarily important to the strength of education in our state, but also it has budgetary impacts," the governor said.
He told reporters that other factors -- from Medicaid to the prison population -- also play a role.
On Tuesday, Isaac Linam, staff attorney at the Bureau of Legislative Research, said lawmakers are not allowed to consider other priorities in their funding recommendation.
The past court ruling "makes it clear that the funding has to be based on need," he said.
Metro on 09/14/2016