Despite February ‘break,’ lawmakers busy in Augusta

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AUGUSTA – After a relatively sleepy start to this year’s legislative session, many lawmakers effectively have this week off from chores at the State House.

Not all will be at leisure or idle. The Appropriations Committee, for example, resumes its public hearings on Gov. John Baldacci’s $6.4 billion biennial budget proposal Tuesday with a focus on some of the most controversial elements in the package affecting human services.

And on Friday, the state revenue forecasting panel meets to discuss a March 1 report to lawmakers and the governor that could enlarge – or shrink – the amount of money expected to be available for the two-year budget cycle beginning July 1.

Whatever happens this week, the February break, such as it is, is expected to be followed by an acceleration of activity that will test professed commitments to balanced spending, tax and education reform, economic development and – with the fate of those goals hanging in the balance – bipartisanship.

“I think we can say that March will be a full month,” said the speaker of the House of Representatives, Democratic Rep. Glenn Cummings of Portland.

“We’ve got to get moving,” echoed Assistant Senate Minority Leader Richard Rosen, R-Bucksport.

One way to watch the legislative session develop from the outside is to do the same thing as some on the inside who try plan it – work backward from April 1, when procedures can change with the help of a governor.

To put a new law in place immediately, lawmakers must enact it with House and Senate majorities of at least two-thirds.

So if, say, budget deliberations extend through the spring toward the July onset of a new spending cycle, lawmakers and the governor are under heightened pressure to reach compromises if a new blueprint is to fit a new fiscal year.

At times in recent years, Democratic majorities have decided the two-thirds threshold gave too much say to minority Republicans. To undercut the GOP negotiating position and/or preclude a repeat of the 1990s state government shutdown, Democrats have put together budget plans with simple majority support – more or less, Democrats only.

Without significant Republican backing, such a budget can’t take effect right away when passed. But if passed by April 1 in advance of a technical letting out of the Legislature, a 90-day time lag after adjournment applicable to ordinary legislation expires by July 1 – in time to have a simple-majority budget formally on the books.

Legislative leaders on both sides claim they want to avoid such a scenario this time around – no unreasonable Republican obstruction and no heavy-handed Democratic power play.

But a tentative timetable for legislation outlined by Cummings – a mid-March report from the Education Committee on various school system consolidation plans, an early emergence of a reform plan from the Taxation Committee, a menu of options to be assembled by a yet-to-be-named Prosperity Committee – draws attention to rather than away from the April 1 showdown date.

“There’s no other logical significance to that kind of a mid-March framework,” Rosen said.

Unilateral action on budget legislation remains an option for Democrats “if we have to,” Cummings said.

“It’s only logical that the majority party would position (itself) for a majority budget,” he added.

Republicans, though, are not without leverage. Even in the minority, they retain ability to withhold their votes and block bond-issue proposals, which require two-thirds majorities before they can be sent out to referendum.

So if Democrats are tempted to think they don’t need Republican help to approve a budget, they know they need GOP assistance for long-term borrowing.

Republicans say they recognize a need for new state investment.

“Will there be a bond package?” asked Rosen. “Of course there will be.”

Senate Minority Leader Carol Weston, R-Montville, seconded Rosen in seeing capital projects worth funding.

“There is enough out there that is necessary,” she said.

Meanwhile, the odds for a majority budget are long, in part because of simple logistics. The second half of March doesn’t provide much time to bring any kind of package out of the Appropriations Committee and upstairs for debate in the full Legislature.

Moreover, not only have Democratic and Republican leaders indicated it would not be their preference, it is uncertain whether a bare 18-17 Democratic Senate edge would hold up.

Senate Majority Leader Elizabeth Mitchell, D-Vassalboro, describes herself after many years in the Legislature including a turn as House speaker as the “consummate optimist” and says she believes the multifaceted plan for moving forward simultaneously on major issues can work.

Still, she concedes, “I don’t know how this Jell-O is going to jell.”

Weston suggests that a bipartisan result will only come from a bipartisan approach.

“It’s a two-thirds attitude that has to be there all along the way,” she said.