Budget stall sends lawmakers home

AUGUSTA – As a budget-balancing bill that would offset a $128 million Medicaid shortfall underwent a second day of debate, the Maine Senate on Friday night unanimously approved an amendment designed to provide $6 million to compensate victims of abuse at Maine’s Baxter school.

Senate deliberations slowed after the amendment, which Baldacci administration officials said calls for a debt restructuring worth about $8 million in all, was endorsed 35-0.

Stalled on several fronts, leaders of the Senate and House of Representatives decided to send lawmakers home until April 27.

Backed by the Democratic legislative majorities and Gov. John Baldacci, the budget package – minus the Baxter school compensation provisions and a few other items – already had received all-but-final approval in the House of Representatives.

Senate debate began in late afternoon and stretched into the night, with proponents defending curbs it would impose on some Medicaid services as a necessary response to unanticipated costs.

Opponents of the supplemental spending plan, worth an estimated $160 million when originally unveiled by Baldacci, complained that it offered only stopgap remedies for a state treasury drain.

“This has been a hard budget,” said Democratic Sen. Mary Cathcart of Orono, a co-chairman of the Appropriations Committee that split along party lines over its provisions.

But she said the panel majority had been able to rework the governor’s initial version to ease some of the social service cutbacks he had proposed and that had drawn “a general public outcry against these cuts.”

Cathcart also sought to highlight the inclusion in the package of $15 million in additional state aid for local schools as well as increased funding for the state’s strained prison system.

“Some wise investments” in those areas, she suggested, offset some of the sting out of the more painful components of the package, including about $60 million in reductions within the Medicaid program itself.

But Republican Sen. Karl Turner of Cumberland, the lone GOP senator on the Appropriations Committee, characterized the Democratic package as the inadequate result of one-sided negotiations that he said had minimized Republican contributions.

“It relies far too heavily on one-time savings,” he said, pegging that amount on the order of $67 million.

Turner also spoke unfavorably about $29 million in taxes, fees and fines and suggested that the package contained insufficient Medicaid cuts, which he calculated at about $53 million.

The first round of House debate on Thursday night featured moments of high tension between Democrats and Republicans that at one point resulted in a walkout by some GOP lawmakers.

On Friday morning, assistant Republican floor leader David Bowles of Sanford circulated a letter “to my fellow legislators” that blamed Speaker Patrick Colwell, D-Gardiner, without explicitly naming him, for bringing the House “into dysfunction and rancor.”

Decrying “our petty bickering and win-at-all-costs mentality,” Bowles expressed sorrow while simultaneously stepping up his criticism of the speaker.

“To the extent that I, as a member of leadership, have occasionally allowed this individual to cause met to act or speak in a manner offensive to any person in either caucus, is inexcusable and a failing on my part alone,” Bowles wrote.

House Majority Leader John Richardson, D-Brunswick, made what amounted to a partial allowance for Bowles’ criticism while rebutting it.

“People get tired at the end of the session. People make mistakes. The apology part seemed to be appropriate. But taking shots at any member of the institution … is inappropriate,” Richardson said.