Reclaim Idaho pulls education funding initiative from ballot

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Organizers of an education funding initiative have asked to have the measure pulled from the November ballot after the Idaho Legislature last week passed a massive tax cut and education spending bill that made the initiative moot.

Reclaim Idaho’s initiative, dubbed the Quality Education Act, would have generated an estimated $323 million each year for K-12 education by increasing income taxes for corporations and the state’s highest-earning residents. That would have amounted to about a 14% increase over the state’s normal education funding.

But the new legislation signed into law on Sept. 1 created a flat income tax bracket for the entire state and increased public education funding by $410 million a year. The flat tax and education funding takes effect on Jan. 3 — effectively overriding the Quality Education Act, which would take effect on Jan. 1 if approved by voters in November.

Reclaim Idaho volunteers gathered signatures across the state for more than a year, ultimately submitting more than 100,000 petition signatures to the Idaho Secretary of State’s office in July, qualifying for the ballot.

Deborah Ferguson, a Boise attorney representing Reclaim Idaho, wrote a letter to Secretary of State Lawerence Denney on Tuesday saying that the initiative should be withdrawn from the ballot “in light of these extraordinary events.”

Deputy Secretary of State Jason Hancock replied the same day, agreeing to the request and saying the measure would not appear on the general election ballot. But he warned that it could cause some confusion for voters, since the state has already begun printing the roughly 800,000 Voter’s Pamphlets that are mailed to every household in Idaho. Hancock said he didn’t know if an initiative has ever been withdrawn so late in...