Budget talks narrow

By Jan Teague, President/CEO

Yesterday afternoon the House Ways & Means committee held its hearing on the Democrat majority party's proposed state budget.  As you would expect, those who testified talked about how serious the cuts were for their various programs.  There will be fewer park rangers, fewer state employees, fee increases, cuts in the public defender program that will hurt the foster care program, cuts in higher education funding, to name a few.

Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on stripping out any extra money that floats in state budgets.  They call it "reversions" and it is a significant amount of money.  They both seem to agree that big banks don't need to get a mortgage tax deduction.   There will also be some fund transfers again, a practice that the legislature has used since the recession hit. That means that money collected for one purpose is used for another.  

Lawmakers also decided not to pay some of their bills on time to schools and to punt their payments into the next budget cycle. All in all, the budget has been tied together and longer-term cuts have been kicked down the road.  In part, this was possible because the deficit was lower than expected after the budget forecast came out last week, so legislators didn't have to make the deeper cuts they had been toiling over in January. 

The budget discussions will continue until the last day of session and we still need to see what the Senate Democrats have come up with next week.  The differences will likely be minor because I do believe the House and Senate Democrat budget writers have been talking and doing some basic agreements ahead of the Senate's budget release. 

This all means that session will end on time on March 8.