Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Tea Parties Turn to Local Issues .

HAMILTON, Ga.—The Harris County Tea Party near the Alabama border campaigned far and wide in this month's midterm elections. Donations were mailed to tea-party candidates in Nevada and Alaska. There were multiple overnight bus trips to rallies in Washington, D.C.

The next stop, however, is closer to home: the local school board.

"Don't get me wrong, we're still going to engage in Washington, but now we're going after what is here locally. Our focus is turning to our community," said Kathy Ropte, the group's founder, over cola at a Blimpie sub shop, a popular local tea-party meeting spot off the town square. Aware that education consumes a big chunk of local property taxes, group members are combing through the salaries of every county school employee from the superintendent down.

After fighting for several months on the highest level of American politics, the leaders of many local tea-party activist groups now plan to take their agendas of limited government and penny pinching to their hometown governments.

Most say they'll stay involved in watching Congress, and dozens attended a recent Washington summit organized by national umbrella group Tea Party Patriots for newly elected members of Congress. But the local leaders say that to truly stem spending, they also must stage what Steven Vernon, vice president of the Tea Party Manatee on Florida's Gulf Coast, calls "a ground-level attack."

"We have to start at the lowest level and take our country back," Mr. Vernon said.

It's also more convenient for tea-party activists—typically volunteers with separate full-time jobs–to be local gadflies than national ones. "We can't go to every congressional hearing in D.C. but we can go to every school-board meeting in Manatee County," said Mr. Vernon, a technology-contracts negotiator.

Meanwhile, many recession-weary local officials are gearing up for a potential clash with tea partiers, saying they have already squeezed all they can out of their budgets.

"Good luck! If they can find the fat, I want to know where it is," said Craig Dowling, the superintendent of the Harris County School District, who said he had a visit from local tea-party activists in late October. "We are driving school buses that are 20 years old. I wonder how many of them are driving 20-year-old cars."

Tea-party groups in Pennsylvania, Delaware and Michigan have recently voiced plans to have members run for local town boards in 2011—a bid to start a farm team of politicians who can move up to higher offices.

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Jennifer Levitz / The Wall Street Journal

Craig Dowling, Harris County schools superintendent, says that if the tea-party activists 'can find the fat, I want to know where it is.'
."We hope to field candidates for the congressional race two years from now, but for 2011, our focus has shifted to the school boards," said Lee Ann Burkholder, spokeswoman for the York 912 Patriots, a tea-party-affiliated group in York, Penn.

The 912 Patriots last month drew some 300 people to an area hotel for a meeting by taking out a front-page ad in a local paper, asking: "Why are your property taxes so high? How is your school district spending your hard-earned dollars? You might be surprised."

"A lot of our members are upset that we have to pay for raises and fund pensions for teachers while many people in York County are out of work," Ms. Burkholder said.

Teachers' representatives warn against skimping on pay. "If you don't invest, you're not going to get the best and brightest and that will manifest itself in student performance," said Brian Koppenhaver, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the union that represents York County school employees.

On Election Day, Don and Diana Reimer, co-founders of the Philadelphia Tea Party Patriots, were in Washington, waving signs for Republican Pat Toomey, a fiscal conservative who won the Pennsylvania Senate race.

Now, the Philadelphia Tea Party Patriots plan to launch the "Watchman Project," in which members will be assigned to attend local government meetings, monitor meeting minutes and then report back to the group, Mr. Reimer said. "If there is a particular vote coming up that we support or oppose, we would all show up to influence what is going on," he said.

Already, tensions are brewing in some municipalities, with local officials saying they need new revenue to maintain public services, while tea-party activists say new taxes aren't an option.

Earlier this month in Troy, Mich., tea-party activists delivered a petition to city hall, seeking to force officials to keep the Troy Public Library open without a new tax.

"We really are embroiled in a big controversy here in Troy," said Janice Daniels, co-founder of the Troy Area Tea Party.

Local voters narrowly shot down a proposal for a library tax on the Nov. 2 ballot. Now, the library is scheduled to close in June.

The tea-party members believe the city can find money for the library by cutting compensation packages of municipal employees, but Mayor Louise Schilling said that "the suggestions made by the tea party are not realistic."

"If you're going to have services, you have to pay for them," she said.

In Georgia, Mr. Dowling, the Harris County school superintendent, said he cut $3.3 million from his budget last year in order to balance the books.

In March, the district will ask Hamilton voters to extend a one-percentage -point increase in the sales tax earmarked for school funding. Without a voter-approved extension, the sales tax would go back down from 7% to 6%.

Mr. Dowling likely won't have the vote of the Harris County Tea Party. "No more money. No more money," said the founder, Ms. Ropte. "They need to learn how to live within their means."

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