BANGOR – The Penobscot County commissioners will reconstitute last year’s budget committee even though the state law governing the committee expired at the end of 2003.

The 15-member committee, made up of legislators and municipal officials, reviews the budget each year and can approve or reject items and override by a two-thirds majority a budgetary change by the commissioners. As such, the budget committee has been an important part of the budgetary process and one the commissioners said they weren’t willing to give up.

“We made it a committee with teeth; they had some say,” Commissioner Tom Davis said.

“It worked and we don’t want to lose it,” he said.

The 1995 law establishing the budget committee, with other counties having similar statutes in place, was scheduled to expire in 1999 although it was revised and rescheduled to sunset on Dec. 31, 2003. In the meantime, lawmakers neglected to make the necessary changes and the Penobscot County budget committee officially ended at the end of last year.

Commissioner Dick Blanchard said the issue had fallen through the cracks, that the 1999 sunset provision remained and hadn’t been removed, as it should have been.

Commissioner Peter Baldacci said he could see how that could happen in the light of the turnover of legislators because of term limits.

The law’s expiration went unnoticed for much of this year, and it was only discovered earlier this fall as Penobscot County Administrator Bill Collins was preparing the budget. Collins said he went looking for information about the budget committee and found references to the law behind the expiration.

He did some more digging, including contacting state officials, and in an Oct. 12 e-mail to the county commissioners he reported that everything he was finding indicated the law had expired. Collins asked how they should proceed.

The commissioners this week agreed to reform the committee with the knowledge that fully resolving this matter will be in the hands of the Legislature.