Budget-balancing maneuver on Medicaid bounced to King> Lawmakers tell govern

AUGUSTA — Members of the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee sent part of Gov. Angus King’s $2.8 million emergency budget back to him Monday, characterizing one Medicaid accounting mechanism as a gimmick.

King’s supplemental budget, a mid-course correction to cover spending requests through June 30, includes a $7.5 million Medicaid book-balancing maneuver allowing the state Department of Human Services to allocate July’s hospital tax revenues to the state in June.

“That provision is not in my budget,” King said. “It was in the prior biennial budget. It’s been in the budget for, I think, three years and pulled the revenues from the prior month.”

That type of maneuver has not been setting well with Appropriations Committee members who want to see an end to accounting gimmicks used by the state in the past two years. State Sen. Dana C. Hanley, R-South Paris, said the “pull doesn’t stand in (conformity) with sound accounting principles.”

“There’s a lot of things that have been carried over from the biennium budget,” Hanley said. “We’re looking at other alternatives, but we’re giving the governor the first shot at seeing if he can find some other places where he can come up with the money rather than leave it on our shoulders to just make the choices as we see them.”

King, who joked with reporters that the term “gimmick” was rapidly becoming something of a talisman for his administration, defended using the accounting procedure in the emergency budget. But he insisted that it was a practice he would abandon when he presents his next biennial budget to the 117th Legislature on Feb. 1.

“It has been a prior practice that I want to eliminate and I think my only disagreement with the Appropriations Committee, if indeed there is any disagreement, is whether we eliminate that practice in the next five months or upon the adoption of the new biennial budget,” he said. “It’s just a matter of timing.”

Hanley said he didn’t believe that the committee’s efforts to have King reconsider the Medicaid accounting procedure would affect the panel’s work schedule.

“We didn’t like the taste of that $7.5 million pull,” he said, adding that he hoped to hear back from the governor today.