BUDGET IMPROVEMENTS

For lawmakers who wondered why Maine went through such prolonged agony last year in trimming relatively small amounts from state spending only to have Gov. John Baldacci swiftly slash $1.2 billion in the next budget, Sen. Karl Turner of Cumberland had the answer. “This budget has something for everybody to hate,” he said this week, and he is certainly right.

Hating it, however, is not enough, and liking it is not a prerequisite for passing it. Gov. Baldacci is no ideologue. He has said often that he wants to work with the Legislature to assemble a budget for the next biennium. But to negotiate, both sides must swiftly produce alternatives that leave no shortfall. The governor has presented a balanced budget with many difficult cuts in essential services – and is hearing about it now, especially in the areas of the unfunded liability on state retirements, education and mental health services. It was encouraging this week to see lawmakers propose some potentially effective alternatives.

One of the more promising is Aroostook Sen. John Martin’s version of paying less on the unfunded liability on the state retirement account for the next biennium, then making up the difference over the following 14 years of the debt. Neither his plan nor the governor’s proposal to extend the debt payment schedule from 16 to 25 years imperils payments to retirees. Both delay financial burdens short-term with the expectation that they can be made up later, but by assuming a larger burden after only two years, Sen. Martin’s plan saves Maine considerably on interest payments. If this sort of financing is allowed, it deserves real consideration.

The choices are more difficult for school funding. Even if schools and their local taxpayers can get by the first year on the 1 percent proposed increase, the second year is daunting – less than 1 percent and distributed to schools that have become more efficient. The governor this week brought together a task force to examine school savings and restructuring, as he promised to do in his budget address. The group must quickly devise ways of saving money through, for instance, reducing administrative costs, contracting for outside services and – dreaded word – consolidation. The state’s share of that saved money should be committed to GPA and toward returning to the pace needed to make the funding formula more reflective of actual per-pupil costs.

With some new money found both by lawmakers and the governor’s office, cuts to services for mentally ill children have been reduced to about 4 percent of the total budget for those services and possible co-pays could further spread the pain. But clearly Maine cannot cuts its grant programs for case management or community support or outpatient services year after year, denying help to its most needy, for the sake of avoiding new taxes. The governor doesn’t need a task force for this one; he needs help on the federal level with new funding, to avoid the pressure of paying fully from state funds, but also a commitment on the state level to match those dollars and provide the services.

When he outlined his budget choices early last month, Gov. Baldacci listed four criteria for funding: program quality, fairness, compassion and cost. Though imperfect, his budget is a reflection of these criteria. Legislative committees have proposed several useful alterations, but the April 1 deadline is near. The task before lawmakers in the next two weeks is to accept that, without new revenues, there is a limited amount of improvement possible in the budget, and that passing it on time clears their schedules for the kinds of reform needed to make significantly improved budgets likely in the future.