Honest state budget took months of work

On Tuesday, March 27, the Joint Standing Committee on Appropriations and Financial Affairs (AFA) reported out a “Part 1 Current Services Budget” with a unanimous vote. This vote was the result of months of work that identified the priorities of the state of Maine and the associated costs.

This work began with the governor and his cabinet in August of last year. In early January, Gov. King’s budget proposal was presented to the Appropriations Committee for their review and subsequent recommendations to the entire Legislature.

The AFA Committee of the 120th Legislature is unlike any of years past as the Senate chair is the sole independent member of the Maine Senate. There are 13 members of the committee: three Senators and 10 House members. There is one independent, seven Democrats and five Republicans.

There are also 17 policy committees that have oversight of the various departments of state government and their respective budgets. The policy committees review department budgets and recommend priorities to AFA. When the collected recommendations of the policy committees exceed available revenue, as happened this year, AFA considers and narrows those priorities to match existing resources and, in this case, also endorsed tax proposals as unanimously recommended by the Taxation Committee to raise the necessary revenues to support an appropriate budget for the people of the state.

The AFA chairs have made a deliberate effort to work in the open and to accommodate everyone’s point of view. Though all legislators suffer from the need to be in three places at once, “Radio Free Appropriations” (the sound system that broadcasts our proceedings throughout the Legislative and Executive branches) allows many people to listen in on our proceedings at all times. Our microphones were open for all of our deliberations.

Extra effort was invested to help the committee function as a team. And, yes, there are differences among the team members that are political, geographical and philosophical. There was, however, a great deal of agreement, collaboration and compromise to arrive at a proposal that would lead to a unanimous report, a report which would be both a responsible document fiscally and a plan to serve the needs and expectations of the citizens of this state. Rather than using our positions on AFA to plug our own programs, the entire committee refrained from adding any of our own amendments to the final proposal. We felt it was a report that deserved the support of both bodies of the Legislature.

The AFA report received greater than two-thirds support in the House. Although many expressed displeasure with various portions of the package it received a favorable 111 to 29 vote. Most respected the recommendations as a proposal that brought a balanced point of view.

The Senate did the opposite. The Senate adopted an amendment created by a very few people. To our knowledge, nobody that had the benefit of the committee process and public hearings was present when this amendment was crafted. The people with the greatest degree of participation at the public level were left out. There was no “constituency” outside of the Senate. The Senate version included their member’s priorities only.

The AFA Committee had said that we couldn’t afford some items or that some items deserved additional consideration in comparison to other efforts. For instance, the Senate amendment recommended that a cost of living adjustment be paid to nursing homes. The AFA Committee had agreed to try to fund an increase in pay for direct caregivers at nursing facilities but also to consider the very same issue as it exists for direct caregivers in areas of service to the mental health and mental retardation communities. Their needs have been excluded by the Senate amendment and all other Part II issues, such as pay raises for our own state employees, have been jeopardized.

Some members of both bodies have pledged to the mantra of “no new taxes.” While that mantra has great appeal it definitely has implications for programs (people). The consequence of the “no new taxes” pledge is that programs must be cut correspondingly. That is one legitimate political point of view. But the Senate proposal adds spending while eliminating taxes, and balances the budget by taking most of the state’s Rainy Day Fund. This is a perilous approach in the best of times, and certainly more so as we see significant slow down of revenue growth due to a declining economy.

No committee report, even a unanimous one, is ever perfect. Improvements can always be made, and indeed given the lack of support in the Senate, must be made to pass a budget. But this Senate version is a collection of 31 people’s priorities. It is acclaimed as a bipartisan agreement but that is not necessarily true very far from the Senate.

The Maine Legislature is efficient in its use of joint standing committees and balanced in the level of agreement that must be reached between the two Houses. Senators were on the right track when they reached across party lines to create an amendment in the Senate but when they neglected to include the House in the process they failed to generate a proposal that could be supported by more than 31 of the 186 legislators.

Sen. Jill Goldthwait of Bar Harbor and Rep. Randall Berry of Livermore are co-chairs of the Joint Standing Committee on Appropriations and Financial Affairs.