Vote for Harry Welty and he’ll (I will) raise your taxes.

If you elect me to the Duluth School Board I will raise your taxes and possibly by quite a lot. There is a simple reason for this. Duluth has a choice. It can keep so many kids in its classrooms that our teachers can’t teach. Or - It can raise taxes to reduce classroom sizes by the ten extra kids forced into them by the Red Plan.

That’s a crumby choice but Duluth is no Detroit. We can fix the damage imposed on our children by the gullible people who gave us the half billion dollar Red Plan without a public referendum.

There are very few candidates running for the School Board this year who will not join me in my decision. Certainly the school board candidates endorsed by AFSCME, The AFL-CIO and soon to be endorsed by the Teacher’s Union will raise taxes and probably a lot more eagerly than I will. The endorsements guarantee it.

They will raise taxes on top of the District’s recent 12% tax increase or the 56% Red Plan increase from a few years before. They will do it because the Red Plan left us with about ten more students in all our classes than there were in 2007. That was the year a Superintendent Dixon supporter wrote a column three days before that year’s school board election in a Duluth News Tribune’s supplement delivered to every house in Duluth. Dixon's supporter called me a liar and much worse. It cost me the election and it cost Duluth a voice of reason on the school board when it was still possible to reconsider the Red Plan.

We can’t afford ten extra students per class. We have already lost over ten percent of our children to competing schools systems and would lose far more if it was still possible for more of them to escape our schools. If I am elected I will not let this calamity continue. I will raise your taxes even more to stop it. However, please pay attention to this:  The school board may have the ability to shift more taxes onto one of the groups  that lobbied for the Red Plan – the business community. You may remember that the Chamber of Commerce seconded Superintendent Dixon’s claim that Duluth would get $200 million dollars worth of new buildings for only $100 million worth of spending.  I think that it is poetic justice for the Chamber to pay a larger portion of this imaginary savings than the rest of us.

I was skeptical of free lunches long before the Business community got caught up in the Red Plan. They weren’t alone. Our unions were so eager for Red Plan jobs they went along for the ride. Now they are endorsing people who will raise taxes just like I will but with a lot of excuses and without acknowledging the truth. Union candidates will also be less likely to exact the price I intend to impose to fix our classrooms. The price is this: I’ll keep teacher’s pay and benefits flat until classroom sizes are back to the sizes we enjoyed when I served on the Duluth School Board.

This will be a small hardship for teachers but not nearly as bad as facing class after class of unmanageable size. The teacher's aren't completely innocent either. They silently went along with Superintendent Dixon as he crammed more students in their rooms because he let them keep their overgenerous health insurance benefits while giving them a pay raise.  

If I am wrong about the priorities of our teachers then I will grimly face a teacher’s strike rather than raise any taxes at all. I’ll use my tax raising authority as a Board member as leverage to 1. keep labor costs down and so hire more teachers to 2. bring class sizes down. Frankly, teachers enjoy never ending income increases which are guaranteed by the "steps and lanes" in their contracts even without negotiated salary increases.

We all must bear a burden to fix our schools. Homeowners, Business, Teachers. As one of the few people running for the Board with any sense of how school finance works I refuse to lie about our choices. I’m lucky in this.  I have the luxury of facing more fun if the Red Planner’s defeat me yet again. I’ve got books to write and grandchildren to spoil. I don’t need to face angry people every month who were betrayed by the School Boards that replaced me in 2004. Mark Twain was right. “First God created idiots. That was for practice. Then he created school boards.”

And don’t just vote for Harry Welty. I’ll need some help on the school board because I can’t solve our problems alone. Vote for Loren Martel too. He’s the man who was handcuffed by Dr. Dixon for telling the truth. We need his kind of grit and determination on our School Board. Loren single handedly got the State Auditor's promise to audit the Duluth School District's books. I'm looking forward to that.

Remember what your parent’s told you. “Honesty is the best policy.”