RALEIGH – Will political realities jar the powers-that-be in North Carolina’s fast-growing metropolitan areas to change their approach to school construction? You might think that the prospect of failed bond referenda and legions of angry parents would be enough to motivate creative thinking on the issue. But obstinacy and self-delusion come with the territory here.

Charlotte, Raleigh, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and many other communities are facing escalating enrollments and costs. Charlotte-Mecklenburg voters defeated a $427 million bond issue last fall, what would have been the downpayment on a far more massive $2 billion spending plan over the coming decade that promised to raise the property tax rate by more than 20 percent. In Wake County, the 10-year plan for school construction truly boggles the mind – one version has a price tag nearly three times the cost from which CMS voters recoiled a few months ago, and would double Wake’s average property-tax bill. It will get its first test in a bond package likely to exceed $1 billion and put before voters this November. Forsyth is planning its own bond issue for the 2006 election cycle. And so it goes.

If reality sinks in, the debate will move quickly beyond these initial forays into fiscal recklessness. I think it is undeniable that Wake County voters will never agree to double their taxes in the space of 10 years, that Charlotte voters will say “no” again to any school-construction plan created by a new citizens panel (led by former Gov. Jim Martin) that resembles the previously unsuccessful one, and that even Forsyth voters, who have the good fortune to reside in a school district willing to think outside the box, may still have grave reservations about taking on a large amount of new debt.

The good news is that in the Wake case, the Triangle Business Journal has just made a major contribution towards the goal of moving the school-construction debate forward – meaning in a different direction than the school board current intends. In a masterful piece of explanatory journalism, the paper lays out the stark fiscal choices, discusses alternatives on both the revenue and expenditure sides of the equation, and explores the political tensions between the school board and county commission that make creative solutions so difficult to implement.

With minor modifications, the points TBJ makes about the Wake County debate also apply in Charlotte, Winston-Salem, and elsewhere. Many of the best ideas, such as opening up opportunities for public-private partnerships and giving families more educational choices, will require legislative action. They can’t be implemented by local officials on their own. In addition, two moves that would help local governments immensely in their efforts to accommodate school enrollment – redirecting all net lottery proceeds to construction and removing the counties’ funding responsibility for Medicaid – must also originate in Raleigh.

Thus the school-facility issue should be near the top of the agenda when lawmakers return for their short legislative session in early May. Ethics concerns may well outrank the issue in media attention and political passion, understandably, but as far as substantive policy matters go, it would be hard to put your finger on a more pressing one than school construction. Only a few months from now, millions of North Carolina voters will be confronted with electoral choices, either local and states candidates or school bonds themselves. Now is the time to begin offering these voters some better options to embrace than either jacking up their taxes again or providing inadequate school facilities to a fast-growing population.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.