Everyone has pet phrases they repeat from time to time, sometimes unknowingly. Some of them are idiosyncratic to a person, like my dad’s running joke for decades that he was “more than just a pretty face.” Others are common among people in a given occupation or role, like “politics ain’t beanbag” or “never make the last out at third base.”

Over the last couple of weeks, as I’ve been compiling and revising budget requests for next year, I’ve found myself muttering, “One-third, one-third, one-third” over and over again. It’s not quite “the horror, the horror,” but it’s getting close.

I’m in one of the states in which the statutory obligation for community college funding spells out that one-third of the operating budget should come from the state, one-third from the sponsoring county or counties, and one-third from tuition. New Jersey had that, too. (Massachusetts doesn’t have county funding at all.) In neither case has reality come anywhere close to what the law specifies.

When I was at Brookdale, the county allocation hovered around 25 percent, and the state around 10. Other than a bit from auxiliary revenues, the rest was covered by students. Here, the state gets reasonably close, but the counties collectively total about 4 percent, and one of them is talking about reducing some more.

The shortfalls have happened over decades, under governors of both parties. (County governments’ partisan identities tend to be more stable over time, but that’s another post.) They’ve become so normalized that it’s easy to forget that they’re technically illegal. Oddly, though, expectations for control don’t diminish when funding does.

Some laws are more enforced than others. Sometimes enforcement goes so far as to exceed or even violate laws. In this case, the laws are effectively ignored.

From a legislator’s standpoint, I can see why it would be difficult to break the cycle of underinvestment. In the states in which I’ve worked, budgets are annual. (Some states have two-year budgets, but the dynamics are basically the same.) That means that decades’ worth of underinvestment are invisible; the only numbers they see are the current year and the proposed coming year. And the way that percentages work makes recovery look much harder than it actually is. If a county is at 4 percent, getting it to 33 percent would require a more than a 700 percent increase. That number feels otherworldly, even if the impact on the overall budget would be marginal.

Worse, budgets don’t always account for inflation. “Flat funding”—a phrase I’ve heard far too often over my career—isn’t really flat; it’s really a cut after inflation is taken into account. And the relevant inflation rate for institutional purposes isn’t just CPI; it needs to consider the rate of increase of health insurance, which far outpaces CPI. Decoupling health insurance from employment would be wildly helpful, but we’re not there yet.

If the skies parted, the winds shifted and those who are supposed to provide funding at prescribed levels actually did, budgeting would be infinitely easier. We’d be able to hire people where needed, pay them better (and thereby keep them longer), and even reduce costs for students. In other words, we’d be better able to fulfill our mission. There was a time when a critical mass of people found that idea appealing. As far as I’m concerned, it still is.

So if you see me muttering, “One-third, one-third, one-third,” don’t be alarmed. It just means it’s budget season, and I’m pining for what, legally, is supposed to be. That seems to be a theme these days.