Maricopa Community Colleges Fight to Spend the Money They Already Have

The Maricopa County Community College District, among the largest in the U.S., finds itself in a strange bind: It has far more money than it can legally spend. The reason is a law more than four decades old.

In 1980, Arizona voters added an annual spending limit for community college districts to the state Constitution in a referendum. The district’s expenditure limit is calculated each year based on the amount it spent in 1980, adjusted for student enrollment and inflation. The district isn’t allowed to spend more without year-to-year permission from the State Legislature, even if it has available funds.

Now, a new spending limit for Maricopa County Community College District is on the ballot next month. The vote could have major ripple effects on the sprawling 10-college district in Arizona, which now serves more than 100,000 students, almost triple its enrollment in 1980. District leaders say they’ll have to make massive spending cuts if the proposition doesn’t pass.

Proposition 486 seeks to increase the annual base amount used to calculate the community college district’s budget cap. The move, if successful, would raise the spending limit from about $451 million for the 2025–26 academic year to an estimated $902 million, the district says. Taxes wouldn’t increase, nor would funding for the district, but district leaders would have more flexibility to spend what they do have.

“What we’re asking voters to do will not impact their tax bill at all,” said Susan Bitter Smith, president of the district’s governing board. “This is not changing property taxes for them by one iota … It isn’t that we don’t have the money. We simply cannot spend it.”

District leaders have had to go to the State Legislature the last two legislative sessions to ask that they not accrue penalties for spending beyond the limit. Both requests were granted, but Bitter Smith said she’d rather not keep repeating the process to avoid wasting state lawmakers’ time and provide a “sense of assurance” that the district can operate with a budget that meets its needs rather than having to annually “ask for forgiveness.” The district’s funding doesn’t even come from the state, which eliminated state funding to the Maricopa and Pima County community college districts in 2015. Maricopa Community Colleges have had to rely more heavily on property taxes and tuition dollars.

“The 1980s numbers don’t make sense at this point,” Bitter Smith said. She noted that since the spending cap was created, the district expanded from seven to 10 campuses and the county population “exploded”—and so has enrollment. The district has also added programs, including new baccalaureate degrees. Plus, “all of the technology that’s become just day-to-day expectations didn’t exist in 1980,” such as online course offerings, “and those things do cost money.”

Deanna Villanueva-Saucedo, the district’s associate vice chancellor for the Center for Excellence in Inclusive Democracy, noted that as technology evolves in careers like health care, community colleges also need to update their labs and equipment to properly train students for future jobs.

“It’s a rapidly changing landscape,” Villanueva-Saucedo said. “And if we want to keep up, that comes with a heavy price tag.”

Paying the Price

District leaders say that if the proposition doesn’t pass, Maricopa Community Colleges will be forced to cut up to $100 million in expenses, roughly equivalent to the budget of one of the district’s largest colleges or two of its smallest. They say going to the State Legislature every year is too onerous and isn’t a long-term option.

In the past, “we’ve gone to the Legislature for relief on penalties that would accrue, but we certainly can’t do that in perpetuity,” said Villanueva-Saucedo. “We don’t want to be in conflict with our own state Constitution.”

Bitter Smith said there’s already a working group in place to think through where cuts should be made and make recommendations to the board. “The governing board would have to make those tough decisions,” she said. “But we obviously are hoping, and in some ways praying, we don’t have to do this.”

The Maricopa Community Colleges Faculty Association came out with a September statement in support of the proposition, asking faculty members to text a video promoting the policy shift to all their contacts. Association leaders also expressed fears about how budget cuts could affect faculty members and students if the proposition fails to pass.

“That could mean eliminating programs, massive tuition increases for students, or even the closure of one or more of our colleges,” the statement read. “It would certainly mean job losses on a scale never before seen in the history of the Maricopa Colleges. We CANNOT allow that to happen.”

Similar Challenges in California

California community colleges are in a somewhat similar bind with the state’s Fifty Percent Law, enacted in 1961, which requires community colleges in the state to spend half of their budgets on classroom instruction, limiting the funds available for other costs. While many faculty members are in favor of the law, arguing it supports smaller class sizes and full-time professors, campus leaders have been pushing to get rid of the spending restriction for more than a decade.

“The evidence is clear that students need support services,” said Larry Galizio, president and CEO of the Community College League of California, which represents community college presidents and trustees. “They need advising, they need counselors, they need librarians and a support network … You need technology, infrastructure to work, all the other elements.”

Galizio said, as far as he knows, no other states aside from California and Arizona are “hamstringing their public community colleges in these extreme ways, in self-defeating ways.” He noted it might be possible to get the issue on California’s ballot someday, but campaigning for it would be costly, so for now, college leaders are trying to convince state legislators to change the law.

“I think at the end of the day, if you ask voters, citizens, people in any state, they want public institutions that are effective and produce the outcomes that are desired,” he said. He believes California community college leaders need more “latitude” over their spending to make decisions that best serve their particular regional communities and students.

“We need to be accountable. We need to be transparent. But we need to not have restrictions that hamper the ability for the professionals to actually follow the evidence,” Galizio said.

No Opposition, but Ongoing Worries

The Maricopa County proposition has no formal opposition. But district leaders worry its place at the bottom of a two-page, double-sided ballot may mean it’s overlooked or that voters gloss over its nuances—namely that the measure wouldn’t actually require additional tax dollars.

The proposition has a lot of competition for voters’ attention. The Maricopa ballot holds the fates of 144 elected offices, including a heated Arizona Senate race, 45 judges up for retention and a whopping 76 ballot measures. The county hasn’t had a ballot this long in almost two decades.

“There’s a lot of stuff going on right now politically,” Bitter Smith said. “We want to make sure we don’t get lost in the fray.”

Maricopa has also been a hotbed of political discord, thrust into the national spotlight since the last presidential election cycle. Former president Donald Trump and his supporters accused the county of voter fraud after the 2020 presidential election, even after a Republican-led State Senate audit confirmed President Biden’s narrow victory in the county and in the battleground state. Maricopa County election officials received repeated violent threats for not siding with Trump’s claims, which has led to enhanced security at its election headquarters this fall, The Wall Street Journal reported. Maricopa County recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, lost his primary race in July.

Bitter Smith said she and other district leaders have been speaking at as many local community organizations and events as possible to advocate for the proposition. Supporters in the district have also fundraised for the proposition’s campaign committee, run by residents, which has been doing similar advocacy.

“There’s just no way that seven board members and our volunteers can get to every single meeting in Maricopa County through this cycle,” she said. “But fingers crossed, we’re working hard, and I think our odds are good.”