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Sat, 10 May 2008
Highlights from the Supplemental Budget Follies
As expected, the supplemental budget passed the Senate last week, though it nearly ran off the rails in the Senate Finance Committee where a majority of the committee voted against it.
What's that? It lost in committee? Then how did it pass? Let's call it some extraordinary parliamentary maneuvering.
In an official sense, the Senate President and the Majority and Minority leaders sit on all the committees of the Senate, though they almost never attend or vote on committee matters. But last week, six of the ten Finance Committee members decided to vote against the budget, which forced all three of the ex officio members to interrupt whatever else they were doing, and show up at the Finance committee to cast their votes for the budget, in order to get the bill out of committee, 7-6.
The joke hiding here is not just that it took this much work to provide for a budget that slashes RIte Care, including for some legal immigrants, accelerates a few thousand retirement decisions among state employees, cuts money from all the cities and towns in the state for the current fiscal year, imposes a tax on bottled water, and cuts income taxes for the wealthiest taxpayers. The joke is also that it took two extra Democrats and one extra Republican to do it. The Republican was voting for his Governor's budget. What were the Democrats doing?
For the record, these were Minority Leader Dennis Algiere of Westerly and Senate President Joseph Montalbano of Pawtucket, N. Providence and Lincoln and Majority leader Teresa Paiva-Weed of Newport. Montalbano and Paiva-Weed apparently felt that passing this was more important than honoring the will of the committee members they appointed.
So the new '08 budget passed, and now your city or town has to figure out how to cut its budget for the current year, something you might have thought was settled last June. Now we can move on to the disaster of next year's budget, right? Well yes, but not so fast. I'm sorry to report that there is another land mine lurking among the May flowers brought by last week's rain.
Twice a year, the "Revenue Estimating Conference" -- made up of representatives from the House, the Senate and the Governor's office -- gets together to talk about the state's economy, state service committments, and state revenue collections and predictions. The point is to agree on what everyone should expect and base budget numbers on those. They meet early in November and then again early in May, this week. If their agreement doesn't define the shape of the budget, it does define the shape of the debate.
The revenue estimators met all last week, and again this week. They'll come to some agreement late this week, and there are very few people who expect them to say the revenue picture has gotten better since the last Conference, this past November. It's quite likely that the budget will be cut some more before the year is over. This could be the year of the supplemental supplemental budget.
n.b. Their meeting finished yesterday where they decided that the changing revenue picture made this year look worse, but not so much worse that they need to have a supplemental supplemental. Meanwhile, next year's budget hole increased by $55 million. There will be a report out this coming week to add detail.
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