In politics, it’s easy to pass the buck — or the blame — through the age-old practice of unfunded mandates.

It’s the practice where one government orders an agency or a lesser governmental entity to take a specific action to fix a problem, but doesn’t supply the money to make it happen. The mandate makes the agency or the community fix the problem out of their own budgets, which is often nearly impossible to accomplish without raising taxes, cutting services or both.

Even more, this practice usually rears its head at election time to give voters the idea that leadership is truly addressing problems rather than letting them slide. But the fact that those leaders have to issue a mandate in the first place shows the problem did slide. And sometimes, those same state leaders avoid transparency by using mandates as a scare tactic to get legislative or voter approval for unpopular or controversial legislation that they support.

That’s the case currently with two state mandates in the past three weeks.

And to no surprise, the mandates surfaced as Gov. Kate Brown endorsed Measure 97, the highly controversial ballot measure that would create a 2.5 percent tax for some corporations on gross sales of more than $25 million, rather than taxing those corporations on their on the profits as now is the case.

Supporters of the measure say it would raise an additional $3 billion and help Oregon fix long-standing problems and avoid a looming $1.4 billion deficit. Supporters also say the tax revenue would be spent only on schools, seniors and health care. Opponents point out the regressive nature of the tax and say corporations would simply pass the tax on to customers who can afford it least. The measure, they say, would curb private sector growth while boosting public sector hiring. They also point out that lawyers for the Legislature say tax dollars raised by Measure 97 could be spent however lawmakers please. In her endorsement, though, Brown said she would make sure the money goes to those areas.

The first mandate came in early August when the state Treasury announced that the bill for schools, cities, state agencies and other public employers in Oregon will rise by $885 million next biennium to fund the state’s public employee pension system. The $885 million is much higher than was forecast and represents a 44 percent increase from what public employees are currently paying into the pension plan to support it.

Next came an order from the Oregon Board of Education after it adopted a new, fast-tracked rule at the behest of the governor that requires testing for lead and radon in schools, public disclosure of problems that are found and the elimination of each problem when discovered. School districts are required by the mandate to have a preliminary plan in place by October and a finished plan by January. While parents and educators all agree that fixing those problems needs to happen and happen quickly, the order came without a funding mechanism in place. The state School Boards Association predicts the mandate could cost districts hundreds of millions of dollars statewide. Fortunately, districts on the North Coast have been proactive and only a handful of problems have surfaced so far.

Public schools are also facing another challenge that was mandated by the Legislature in 2007. It requires they provide a minimum of 150 minutes of physical education instruction per week for kindergarten through fifth grade and 225 minutes for sixth through eight grade. Schools must meet the standard by 2017, but less than 10 percent of 1,080 public schools with some or all grades K-8 are in compliance. School advocacy groups are asking lawmakers to either push back the 2017 deadline or to allow a phase-in. Funding for additional PE teachers is one of the reasons the advocacy groups have cited for the poor compliance rate.

Real leadership is needed in addressing each of these problems.

PERS in its present form simply isn’t sustainable, and there are a number of reform options available. The governor and legislators, however, have been reluctant to attack the problem head on. Lead in drinking water at schools is curable, and the fact that there was no statewide requirement for even testing until 2016 says the state Board of Education and those who oversee the board from the governor’s office were asleep at the wheel. The problem of physical education for children in K-8 is even more curable with innovation and creativity at the local level and the proper leadership and focus at the state level.

Each of those problems have their own individual solutions, and state leaders, especially those at the top, should be just that. They should be visible to the public and transparent with their motives and actions instead of using unfunded mandates as their method of operation. And importantly, they should quit looking for the easy cure-all fixes for problems the state faces. They should know from experience that easy fixes aren’t always the right fixes.