Budget priorities

Gov. Angus King’s State of the State was as it should be — at turns uplifting, thought provoking, serious, light-hearted, detailed and sweeping. And while lawmakers certainly wanted to know about the policies he believes are essential for carrying Maine forward during the next three years, the real question was, How would he spend the surplus?

The governor did not get out a ledger and add up the lines on his supplemental budget to explain how he apportioned the unexpected $250 million, but he offered enough specifics to give them an idea of what he will support. And what he supports is too much — both in programs and in tax cuts that create a structural gap of $300 million for the next budget to fill. He should consider resubmitting a scaled-down version of his proposals to better reflect the money available.

Throughout the last five years revenue projections have turned out to be overly pessimistic, and Maine has had the happy experience of discovering money it did not expect to have. Don’t count on that to continue. For the first six months of this fiscal year, projections were a mere $10 million off actual collections — pocket change, given the size of the budget. And the hoped-for miscalculation for the next forecast, which would have provided an additional $70 million, looks now like wishful thinking.

Given the overspending during the last budget session, Maine’s current surplus should be regarded as strictly one-time money. Use it to pay for prison-building overruns, use it for the Atlantic Salmon Conservation Plan or to meet the challenge scholarship grant for Maine’s Community College Partnership, use it to help cover the Medicaid shortfall, but — with a single exception — don’t use it to create or expand programs or tax cuts that will grow exponentially in the next couple of years.

The exception is education. General Purpose Aid to Education was badly underfunded beginning a decade ago and has been running behind ever since. The state has an obligation to communities to meet its share of GPA and to relieve property taxpayers from being forced to carry an unfair load. A significant increase — well over what the governor has proposed so far — not only keeps a promise and provides a tax break, but produces a more honest funding formula, allowing the state to account for more of the money actually spent by school districts. This is essential if Maine students — all Maine students – are to continue to improve without breaking the budgets of their local school districts.

It is easy to lose sight of the fact that the current legislative session is supposed to deal only with emergencies and clean up unfinished business — like school funding, which lawmakers pledged to return to this session when they closed the session last spring. But this is generally is not a time to initiate major new expenses, particularly ones that will place programs in jeopardy next year when it is time to craft a new budget.

There is a risk in a large increase to the state’s share of school funding, but the governor and the Legislature should be willing to take a risk that moves the state toward meeting its obligations to towns and cities and helps ensure that children from one end of the state to the other have the opportunity to succeed. Debate other ongoing expenses next session.