After receiving the results of a recent audit it appears that the state of Missouri could have been spending an additional $21 million on its public school system, had the state’s lawmakers more closely heeded the wishes of voters regarding the distribution of new casino revenues.
A November 2008 ballot measure raised the taxes on casinos and also eliminated Missouri’s then-current upper limits on how much gamblers could lose. Part of the ballot directed this new revenue to the state to be placed in a separate fund and put toward the school system. This gambling revenue was to be spent on the schools in addition to their normal funding.
Legislators changed this initiative last year, after a budget analysis determined that this new law created technical difficulties for the state’s school funding formula. Analysts declared that many schools were not eligible to receive the additional money, and that some of the funds might remain in the separate school funding account and not distributed to schools at all. So, the requirement that treated casino revenues as new money for schools was removed and the money is now deposited into the same fund as all other income from casino operations.
Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Rob Mayer believes that the results from the recent audit, headed by Auditor Susan Montee, are incorrect. He believes that schools are still getting more additional income from casino revenues than they would have received under the original law regarding the distribution of this income.
Montee claims that as a result of the change in the handling of the casino revenues, state legislatures are now using casino revenues to offset school spending reductions from other areas of the state’s budget. Had the former way of storing and distributing the casino revenues been used, $20.9 million more would have been spent on K-12 education than what was budgeted for the current school year.
“We were skeptical from the beginning that this proposition would provide additional state money to education, and this audit has confirmed that,” Brent Ghan, a Missouri School Board’ Association spokesman said.
Mayer maintains that had the law not been changed, less than a quarter of the new casino revenues would have made it into the school system at all. Mayer did acknowledge that some of these revenues have bee used to offset declines in the budget for public schools, but this was a result of the 15% fall in general state revenues over the past two years.
