Montana passes the budget hat; Maine, the buck

Montana, like most states, is wrestling with a severe budget crisis. Like most state legislatures, Montana’s is now in special session trying to turn the stop-gap spending reductions ordered by their governor last spring into long-term restructuring of spending and taxation policies.

One such stop-gap is an across-the-board 25-percent cut in the travel allowances for state agencies. It didn’t take Montana lawmakers long to figure out that this meat-cleaver approach affected some programs more adversely than others – such as a program that provides day-to-day living assistance to the blind.

The amount cut from this small but vital program was just $1,000. Rather than waste hours arguing about such an insignificant sum, Montana lawmakers did the sort of sensible, straightforward thing for which their state is famous. They passed the hat.

The first pass around the House chamber raised $526 (most, the news story noted, from the GOP side of the aisle). The rest was raised as soon as Democrats fetched their wallets from their other pants. A unanimous vote restored the program to full funding.

Throughout the country, state legislatures are wrestling away, with no holds barred. Massachusetts and Nebraska are cutting deeply into state programs in order to not cut K-12 education. After years of stalemate on the issue, Nevada is expanding its sales-tax base, now with the support of its business community. North Carolina is eliminating a costly double-dip loophole in its state retirement package, something it has long said it needed to do but never did. Iowans have been told they’ll have substantially fewer services and slightly higher property taxes. Californians no longer use regular calendars – this is Day 35 of The Incredibly Ugly Special Session that, besides being quite entertaining to watch, inevitably will result in fundamental change in the way California governs itself.

Some state legislatures already have done fundamental change and gone home. Indiana reformed $3 billion worth of spending and taxation policies. New Jersey and Connecticut have newly balanced budgets, thanks largely to the postponement of bond-financed construction projects. Wisconsin filled its $1.1-billion hole, Utah did $173 million. Painfully, not with Montana’s panache, but at least they made tough decisions and got the job done.

Here in Maine, the latest news on our budget crisis (this is Day 100, by the way, during which time the hole has grown from $180 million for the two-year budget cycle to $210 million) is that the Appropriations Committee may meet soon to craft the framework of a revised budget package based upon Gov. King’s recommendations. After that, the full Legislature may be called into special session. It may be next month, it may be later.

This continues the unbroken string of “mays” that began in early May. The official line for this rather leisurely response to crisis is that it is important for Appropriations to develop a general agreement that the Legislature can act upon in an orderly fashion with benefit of the most recent fiscal data.

Remember what your mamma said about accepting official lines. Remember that the Appropriations Committee so key to orderliness is the same committee headed by the same independent Sen. Jill Goldthwait whose thoughtful work on the 2001 budget was slaughtered in a midnight massacre by Republican and Democratic leaders while their promises of a power-sharing agreement still rang through the State House. Remember that the most recent fiscal data we’re waiting on is a revenue forecast that will be developed by the same forecasters who dug this hole by failing to make the connection between a declining stock market and declining tax revenues and that a forecast is nothing more than an estimate of what might happen in the future, while the need for Maine to reform its spending and taxation policies is real and immediate.

Remember, too, that this governor has a history of keeping the Legislature out of his business as long as possible – from the last-minute Bath Iron Works tax break in ’96 to the hurry-up workers’ comp reform this spring – so that lawmakers have little choice but to go along. Should you believe, as he claims, that he was not made aware of the original $180-million shortfall until some six hours after the Legislature adjourned on that early May morning and lawmakers already were headed home? Ask your mamma.

Mostly, though, remember that there’s an election in November. Democrats don’t want a special session before the election – they’ll have to choose between cutting the programs that define them as Democrats and raising taxes. They worry that, in the event of the latter, Republicans will burn them during the campaign.

They worry for good reason. In the 2000 campaign, they got scorched by the GOP’s Maine Unlimited PAC, headed by now-Senate President Rick Bennett. The PAC’s mailings were outrageous, misleading (they did, however, stop short of accusing Democrats of cannibalism) and they worked – the GOP pulled into a tie in the Senate that resulted in that power-sharing agreement that is such a roaring success. Some legislatures went in to special session with a statesmanlike agreement to serve the public without seeking partisan advantage. Maine’s hides behind the need to preserve orderliness that never existed and to find precise numbers that never will.

Actually, the latest, latest news on Maine’s budget crisis is that Gov. King said the other day the next governor and the next Legislature will have some very difficult decisions to make on spending cuts, raising taxes and fundamental reform of fiscal policy. This suggests, of course, that the current crew will stick with the easy decisions – furlough days for state employees, shuffling money around from account to account, cutting new programs that save money and work (like Experience at Sea, the foster group home for teenage boys) and keeping old ones that don’t (like too many to list).

Back in early May, Maine was one of 46 states that developed sudden budget crises. Today, it is one of a very few that have done nothing about it. The difference is political courage, a precious commodity apparently out of Maine’s price range. Maybe we could borrow Montana’s hat.

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