STATE BUDGET PATCHES

“Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes

on Thee, and I’ll forgive Thy great

big joke on me.”

– Robert Frost

The little jokes of both the Democratic and Republican bills that would remove a $250 million loan in Maine’s next budget are pay deferrals, project delays, cuts to municipalities and niggling changes to fix serious structural problems. The cuts build shakily on one another until both parties reach the required offset – Democrats with the help of a $1 per pack cigarette-tax increase; Republicans by chopping up health care coverage.

These shortcomings should be forgiven, at least when compared with the great big joke of the loan. Both are better than the earlier plan.

But neither proposal gets at the calculation Maine faces – a high tax burden that doesn’t cover government costs to be met by low to moderate salaries in the presence of high and rising health care costs. It’s a difficult problem but not an impossible one, especially now that Maine government revenues are rising slightly along with the rest of the states. Yet the primary legislative answer seems to be the answer that all governments give: pass the costs down the line.

The budget bill passed by Democrats on the Appropriations Committee would cut municipal revenue sharing by $5 million, eliminate the local efficiency funds that are supposed to save money long-term, delay payments for the veterans property tax reductions, increase fees on teachers, reduce bus allocations and slice $7 million from the Business Equipment Tax Reimbursement. Republicans, in their minority report, do much of the same, sparing BETR funding but cutting $1 million for local planning.

Pushing these costs down to towns and cities, of course, won’t make them go away; it will merely make them someone else’s problem.

With municipal revenue sharing, the GOP would book one-time savings of $18 million by switching the state’s municipal-sharing program – in which 5.1 percent of sales and income taxes go to towns and cities – to a general fund budget line with standard payments equal to what the communities would have received under the old system. The savings come from the fact that these revenues accrue one month and are paid the next; by holding onto them in June ’06 and beginning the regular budget payments the next month, the June payments are saved. The idea unfortunately meets ongoing costs with one-time money, and its effect on the state spending cap, according to the administration, is disastrous.

Ds and Rs agreed on about $110 million in cuts and might have gotten further under better circumstances. Reforms to Medicaid will become essential over the next couple of years; giving Dirigo Health a chance to prove itself in exchange for these reforms could have been a useful bipartisan compromise. Similarly, Republicans weren’t interested in discussing the cigarette tax increase, but an honest compromise could have traded some of the health care cuts sought by the GOP for their support of a smaller tax increase.

Instead, the People’s Veto looms as legislators try to patch up a budget that should have been finished weeks ago.