Budget feud erupts over county funds > Lawmaker: Colleagues attached `pet projects’

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AUGUSTA — Forget the state budget.

The real battle over dollars and cents in the 117th Legislature could be played out Monday over a measly $9,500 request in the Penobscot County budget.

In what he described Thursday as a “stand for principle,” Sen. Stephen E. Hall, R-Guilford, has torpedoed the $7.5 million Penobscot County budget in the Senate in an 18-14 vote that split along party lines.

The Piscataquis County senator, who represents only eight Penobscot County towns, claims three legislators have subverted the budget’s public hearing process by attaching after-the-fact “pet projects” to the spending plan.

House Democrats have responded by postponing action on the Piscataquis County budget until Monday on the basis that the county’s spending package may require some review and possible adjustment.

Unless a compromise is reached, Penobscot County could wind up with no new budget and be forced to pay its bills on a formula based on 80 percent of its current operating budget. That option would almost certainly result in layoffs and curtailment of some services, according to legislators.

With both budgets essentially taken hostage, the same cutbacks could be applied to Piscataquis County if House Democrats are as successful as Senate Republicans in making the budget a partisan issue.

Senate Minority Leader Mark W. Lawrence, D-Kittery, postponed reconsideration of the Penobscot County budget in the Senate Thursday until Monday when, the issue is expected to be revisited. The House is slated to consider the Piscataquis County budget on the same day.

At the center of the dispute is Rep. Herbert E. Clark, a Millinocket Democrat with 15 years of service in the Legislature. The chairman of the Penobscot County delegation and a low-key, behind-the-scenes coordinator, Clark is poised for a high-profile showdown with Hall over three items in the Penobscot County budget:

$5,000 sought by Clark for his hometown’s Millinocket Economic Development Committee.

$2,500 sought by Rep. Hugh Morrison, D-Bangor, for the Shaw House home for troubled adolescents.

$2,000 sought by Rep. Don Strout, R-East Corinth, to fund a raise for Penobscot County Sheriff Ed Reynolds.

But bucks are not the issue for Hall, who claims that Clark, Strout and Morrison essentially ignored the desires of the Penobscot County commissioners by including the items in the budget after a public hearing before the county’s budget advisory committee was held last December.

Hall admitted he chose to exclude two other items from his list that also never saw the light of day through the public hearing process. One was a $40,000 appropriation to pump money into the county’s legal defense fund to give the commissioners some leverage in lawsuit settlement negotiations. Hall also allowed another $15,000 that went to Old Town for its hazardous materials control unit.

“The commissioners were in favor of those two and opposed to the other three,” he said.

In fact, all three Penobscot County commissioners sent Hall a signed letter Wednesday indicating their support of his amendment in the Senate to strip the three projects from the budget. The spending plan already had been approved in the House with the $9,500 in expenditures intact.

Clark said that while the commissioners may very well support efforts to cut the projects from the budget, they have told him that they are not excited about losing their overall spending plan as the result of the failure of the House and Senate to reach agreement.

Their level of concern was clear in the letter to Hall.

“As of tomorrow (Thursday) we will have completed five months of our budget year and still do not have final figures to work with,” the commissioners wrote. “Also the county tax bills have not been sent out. If something is not done soon, we will be putting the county’s finances in jeopardy.”

Commissioners in Piscataquis County are apparently equally uneasy.

“I dislike the bickering between the two parties,” said Gordon Andrews, chairman of the commissioners. “I want to represent a majority of my constituents — regardless of whether I was a Democrat or Republican. … It sounds like a political deal. …”

Clark says Hall has it all wrong when it comes to the protocol of passing a county budget. He said the county’s legislative delegation has always reviewed the budget and has made changes based on votes taken in Augusta. He said the current spending package was approved overall 25-3 in separate balloting this spring.

“We don’t have public hearings,” Clark said. “We have one public hearing for the public that the county commissioners give in Bangor. Ninety percent of the budget for any county is put in afterward.”

The Penobscot County budget bill was then reviewed by the Legislature’s State and Local Government Committee, where it received a unanimous ought-to-pass report.

The current saber-rattling in the House and Senate mystifies Lawrence, who believed the nature of the dispute was unprecedented — particularly in the face of a unanimous committee report.

“Usually when this happens you fight your battles in the county delegation,” he said. “Once it’s decided, it’s decided, and it’s just a formality to get it through the Legislature.”

Hall is hanging tough, however, maintaining that legislators shouldn’t be able to overrule county commissioners, who are the most appropriate determiners of the county budget.

“These are basically three representatives’ pet projects that they have managed to get into the budget over the objections of the three elected commissioners without public review or with the budget advisory committee even taking them up,” he said. “Why have a county budget advisory committee if they’re going to do that?”

Hall has offered a compromise through which he would withdraw his amendment, allowing the House version of the bill to pass under the hammer of Sen. President Jeffrey Butland, R-Cumberland.

In exchange, he wants support from Clark for a bill that would forever bar the review of the Penobscot County budget by the county’s legislative delegation. Hall says there are only four counties in the state that rely on such a review process.

That process could be suspended, Clark said, but the Millinocket Democrat opposes making such a large change in the process with only three weeks left in the legislative session. Hall has rejected Clark’s offer to support the compromise on the basis that it take place a year from now after legislators have had a chance to discuss the plan thoroughly.

In the absence of some mutual agreement, Clark is willing to play hardball with the Piscataquis County budget to force a compromise. The decision by House Democratic leadership to postpone action on the Piscataquis County budget has clearly riled Hall.

“They have tabled my budget in Piscataquis, and one senator mentioned that the Piscatquis budget won’t pass unless I back off,” he said. “Obviously that senator doesn’t know me very well. I don’t bow to threats.”

Clark denied that the House vote to postpone action was in any way retaliation for Hall’s amendment.

“Nothing we do upstairs is done in retaliation,” he said. “Only in good compromise. The House does not operate that way.”

Members of the Penobscot County delegation are expected to try and work out their differences on the $9,500 expenditures in the next few days in an effort to avoid cutting back the budgets in both counties or submitting new budget bills to the State and Local Government Committee.