With enactment of the Part I current services budget a week ago, the Legislature left itself with a scant $1.8 million General Fund balance to pay for roughly $64 million in commitments already made to the Part II budget for new and expanded programs. This leaves lawmakers in the unfortunate position of having to embrace some combination of passing the increases in cigarette and meals taxes they shunned in Part I and yet still break commitments. There are better ways to adopt budgets – they are commonly found in most well-run households – but this is one this Legislature has chosen.

When it comes to commitments, some absolutely cannot be broken, such as a modest but vital increase in state aid to education and state employee pay raises already negotiated and long overdue. Some would be foolishly broken, such as those small investments that leverage substantial federal funds. Some should not be broken partly because they are good commitments and partly because, although the acts of one Legislature cannot bind another, commitments are meaningless unless there is a genuine good-faith effort to keep them.

One such example is LD 456, a $4.5 million appropriation to increase access to Maine’s Technical College System. Less than two years ago, the last Legislature, the 119th, adopted an incremental growth program to increase enrollment at the schools to 10,000 degree students from the 5,700 at the time by adding or expanding high-demand programs at the seven campuses. About 1,000 slots have been added so far and this is not the time to quit.

Lawmakers don’t have to take the school’s word for how important this expansion is. In the last decade, no less than three legislative commissions recommended expanding the state’s technical college capacity as a key element in economic development. Business surveys repeatedly cite the shortage of skilled workers across a broad range of fields – such as health care, information technology, electronics and precision manufacturing – as a major impediment to the state’s ability to attract and grow new industries. The discouraging numbers in Census 2000 – essentially flat population statewide, the sharp declines in some rural areas and the out migration of the young – show what happens when investments such as this are not made.

In the context of a total two-year budget in excess of $5 billion, this $4.5 million is a mere rounding error. By forcing so many difficult decisions into Part II, $4.5 million looms large. So does the commitment to Maine’s future it represents.