The Senate works late, to the light of a confusing lamp

Memory is a tricky thing. You think you remember how some-thing that happened actually happened (your high school prom was a night of unbridled bliss) and then you get thinking about it and realize you’re not so sure (or maybe torture in rented formal wear). This is what the poet Nash was getting at when he observed “how confusing the beams from memory’s lamp are.”

Some wicked confusing beams shone on Maine last Thursday night, at precisely 10 p.m. That’s when the Senate announced that the old-fashioned way the state put together its budget – public hearings, open deliberations by the Appropriations Committee, and all that good government hooey – was out. In was the new – spontaneous budget generation through telepathic communication among 31 of the state’s 35 senators. Clean and neat, uncluttered by citizen input, shielded from the harmful UV rays of daylight, a “midnight surprise” pulled off at a respectable hour.

Predictably, this thoughtful effort to save the time and trouble of debating how $5 billion should be spent has been criticized by such persons as the governor, the entire Appropriations Committee and most of the Maine House of Representatives. Their primary whine is that the Senate wants to close the revenue gap by raiding the state’s savings account – using one-time money for ongoing expenses – thus setting Maine up for a repeat of the gimmickry that got us in so much trouble during the last economic downturn, precisely 10 years ago. It’s 1991 all over again, they whine.

At first, this gave me a shudder. Like them, my memory of 1991 and the several years that followed was ugly. Stubborn denial about the state’s troubled finances suddenly was overrun by reality. The quick fixes, Band-Aids and sleight of hand gave way and almost overnight Maine went from being on the move to a place of laid-off state employees on angry picket lines, of local schools getting stiffed out of state aid, of people in true need being ignored, of state responsibilities getting dumped on counties and towns in a hundred different ways and, inevitably, of the dumping getting passed along to irate property taxpayers. Some, me included, suspect that this set in motion the galloping decline of rural Maine and the flight, now documented by Census 2000, to urban suburbs that is limited only by the availability of moving vans.

To see if this recollection is accurate, I poked through the news archives of a decade ago and can only conclude that, though it was a trying time, the State House response had a certain charm to it all, a disarming goofiness. It was as if the Capitol had fallen to a coup of well-meaning, slightly inebriated, frat boys.

(Any stroll down 1991’s memory lane must be done in the context of the 1990 gubernatorial election. In mid-summer, as the economic cooling became apparent, challenger Brennan dared the incumbent McKernan to tell the truth about the Maine economy. McKernan said he deeply resented being called a liar. Brennan said he double-dog resented being called someone who called someone else a liar. This gave rise to the modern “issue-oriented” political campaign as we know it today.)

Anyway, the truth did come out – the day after Election Day – and the frat’s first official, and most famous, act was to bail the state out by having Maine sell a piece of the Maine Turnpike to itself. This legendary prank is revived 10 years later by the 31 senators who propose balancing the budget by raiding the Rainy Day Fund and replacing the money with the Technology Endowment Fund it created last session. This means the Technology Fund gets counted twice – once as a perpetual endowment for cutting-edge education and again as a ready source of emergency cash. Clever, and in the private sector probably indictable.

Other tricks are well known – shuffling state-employee paydays, withholding school subsidies on the thinnest of pretexts – but there’s much more the senators of today could learn by revisiting 1991. Remember Lotto America? Maine’s participation in this multi-state, super colossal lottery (as opposed to our modest little Tri-State Megabucks) was going to have the dollars pouring in. Unfortunately, with the astronomical odds and the fact that all the really big jackpots were won by people in Wisconsin (it’s true, you can look it up), interest here quickly faded and it was an enormous flop.

Fortunately, recent evidence, such as the explosion of scratch-ticket games and the difficulty the Attorney General’s Office has in dissuading people from blowing $5,000 a pop on pyramid schemes, should suggest to lawmakers that the Mainers of 2001 are a more mature and worldly lot, much more eager to get hoodwinked.

My favorite bail-out scheme from a decade ago, one I’d completely forgotten about, was Tax Amnesty. People who hadn’t paid state income in, well, a while were given a narrow window of opportunity to get caught up with no penalties and the payoff was huge – $27 million, nearly three times what was expected. The slogan, “Get to Us Before We Get to You,” clearly clicked with the guilt-ridden public of 1991 and Lord knows the public of 2001 has a lot more to feel guilty about. Update the slogan to tap into computer-age paranoia, say, “We Know Who You Are and What You’ve Been Doing,” and the senators can get ready to count some serious coin.

My return to present day after this trip down memory lane included a stop at post-election 2000. An only slightly yellowed clipping from last December reminded me of how the vote had left the state Senate tied at 17 Republicans, 17 Democrats and one independent, and of how the potential impasse had been avoided by thoughtful and honest negotiations that led to a unique power-sharing agreement built upon respect and fairness, an agreement that included making the independent the chairman of the Appropriations Committee.

I didn’t remember anything in the agreement about the Appropriations Committee being made irrelevant, but maybe it’s just those confusing beams again.

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.