The budget gap is no secret. Lawmakers and two administrations have been wringing their hands over the ever-widening chasm between state revenues (taxes) and ongoing spending levels since last May. But no answers have been forthcoming since. During the Democratic primary and the General Election for the gubernatorial post, the subject was studiously avoided except in code. The message was: Candidates would find the money somehow.
During the campaign, Gov. Peter Shumlin said he’d fill the gap by saving $40 million in reductions in Corrections or through some unspecified amount made available through the adoption of a single-payer medical system.
Once elected, Shumlin stopped mentioning these options as solutions to the state’s ongoing budget problem (though these items could yield significant savings eventually, the fiscal year 2012 deadline was deemed unrealistic). Instead, the governor-elect and the guy who handles day-to-day operations for state government — Jeb Spaulding, the secretary of the Agency of Administration – began to talk about just how austere the cuts to state government could be. They eschewed the idea of raising broad-based taxes and dipping into the budget stabilization fund (a kind of money market account backing up the state’s checkbook). No new taxes, Shumlin has said. Dipping into the $54 million rainy day fund? Fuggedaboutit.
Last Thursday in his weekly presser, the governor refused to divulge any information about the budget, except to smile and invite reporters to join him Jan. 25 for the budget address. He dropped a few hints, though: He said no one program would be jettisoned – the pain would be spread across agencies. Would the Challenges for Change government restructuring plan survive the cut, we asked? He wouldn’t say.
Well, folks, the moment of reckoning is not only nigh, it’s merely hours away. (Shumlin gives his budget address at 2 p.m. today.) Meanwhile the budget gap has yawned a little wider, then lessened somewhat. It was originally projected to be $112 million, then it gaped to $150 million, and after the recent revenue projections, it settled in at roughly $130 million.
The number is still large enough to give any politician pause. Shumlin, for weeks, has been telling reporters that his initiatives won’t be popular.
We asked Tom Evslin, a former member of the Douglas administration, if he had any ideas for possible savings in advance of the governor’s budget address, figuring that Shumlin might bank on some of the suggestions originally offered by his predecessor.
Evslin came up with a long short list of items, including a number of proposals that incurred the ire of the Vermont Legislature, such as closing the Windsor prison; further cutting the “designated” agencies, the nonprofit groups that provide mental health services and support for developmentally disabled Vermonters; tightening eligibility for benefit programs; selling state buildings; sending state computing functions to an “outsourced cloud”; reducing teacher and state employee benefits; eliminating economic development grants; and working toward a statewide teachers’ contract.
Would the Dems be willing to accept these cuts, many of which originated with the Douglas administration? Evslin says it will be more palatable for the Democrats to cut programs than it was for a GOP governor.
After Shumlin gives his address on Tuesday, his remarks will be followed by an hourlong explainer from Spaulding in the House Appropriations Committee. Once the formal announcement is over, lawmakers in House Approps will begin to digest the news spreadsheet by spreadsheet the rest of this week. Their schedule is packed with meetings to be held with individual commissioners of departments.
VTDigger.org will have video footage of the address and the explainer; Jon Margolis will be writing a political analysis and Anne Galloway will be delving into the details.
Meanwhile, the BAA passes without a hitch
Though the news is likely to be grim on the fiscal year 2012 front, it could be worse. At least the books for fiscal year 2011 are spot on, with money to spare.
The budget adjustment total is roughly $6 million, or less than 1 percent of the total General Fund budget for fiscal year 2011. In previous years, the reconciliation of the mid-year budget has been as high as $30 million, or roughly 2 percent of the previous year’s budget, according to the Joint Fiscal Office.
Because the state saw a slight increase in unanticipated revenues, it was able to put aside $29 million in caseload reserve funds for AHS. That money will be available to cover needs in the Agency in fiscal year 2012, according to the Joint Fiscal Office.
That minus $6 million figure was zeroed out with funds from the Agency of Human Services.
The BAA includes “ups” (amounts in the minus column, or areas where the state overspent budget targets) and “downs” (amounts in the plus column, or areas where the state underspent budget targets). Several of the biggest minuses include $3.2 million in Challenges for Change reductions that were never identified, and a $3.5 million computer system for the Department of Finance and Management (the 10-year-old budget system was on the fritz). Lawmakers also found $500,000 for homeless shelters. On the plus side, the homeowners’ rebate program was several million dollars in the black (not as many Vermonters qualified for the program as expected)
Because the state saw a slight increase in unanticipated revenues, it was able to put aside $29 million in caseload reserve funds for AHS. That money will be available to cover needs in the Agency in fiscal year 2012, according to the Joint Fiscal Office.
The BAA includes an authorization for $19 million in federal stimulus money to flow out to local school districts.
In addition, the state met its statutory budget stabilization obligation; it put $54 million, or 5 percent of the fiscal year 2010 budget, into the temporary savings account for a rainy day.
The Budget Adjustment Act emerged from the House Appropriations Committee on a unanimous vote and then the House passed the bill 129-2 last week. The Senate Appropriations Committee began taking testimony on the bill on Friday.
Single-payer limelight
This week the budget will draw all the oxygen out of the Statehouse; last week it was health care. The single-payer reform announcements which were released over three days in press conferences (including a rare appearance by the congressional threesome), a briefing to the entire General Assembly and meetings with lawmakers and stakeholders were carefully “choreographed” as the Vermont Chamber of Commerce put it.
By the end of the week, many of those stakeholders – hospital executives, doctors, business leaders, unions and others – still had a lot of reading and meeting to do over the weekend (many were still refraining from making comments to the press). The administration’s bill, which will be presented without a payment mechanism (Shumlin says he wants to cut health care spending first) is due to hit the House Health Care Committee this week, and when it does, the players inside and outside the industry will begin to line up to give testimony.
Harvard economics professor William Hsiao’s recommendation that Vermont adopt a single-payer health care system made headlines in the left-leaning segments of the national press last week. Huffpo called it a “provocative push” that would take the place of President Barack Obama’s health care reform efforts.
Democracy Now featured Shumlin in a live interview with Juan Gonzalez.
Meanwhile, Physicians for a National Health Program, a national association of doctors who support a single-payer medical system, analyzed Hsiao’s report and tentatively supported his recommendations. The group has reservations about the Harvard professor’s decision to tout “Option 3,” a plan that would allow a private company to handle medical claims; PNHP prefers “Option 1,” in which a government entity administers payments for bills.
Still PNHP found plenty to like. Dr. Don McCanne who analyzed Hsiao’s report in a blog post, wrote: “The report emphatically confirms the superiority of the single payer model in ensuring that everyone is included while containing health care costs.”
As the public records requests turn …
As you may recall, Abigail Winters, a lawyer representing the Vermont State Employees Association, recently won a victory against the State of Vermont in court. VSEA sued the Douglas administration over budget documents pertaining to a layoff in the Agency of Natural Resources and a computer program designed to monitor state employee use of the Internet known as Marshall86.
Winters won the right to view records that the state said she should pay $1,300 to see.
Winters hasn’t seen the state documents yet because the Attorney General’s office is considering whether to appeal in the next several weeks.
Though she won her day in court, the battle isn’t over. Winters hasn’t seen the state documents yet because the Attorney General’s office is considering whether to appeal in the next several weeks.
Meanwhile, Winters had to meet a court-ordered deadline for filing a motion asking the state to pay her fees and costs. The 15-page motion includes information about the pay rates of other lawyers, a lengthy breakdown of her hours spent on the case and a rundown of the 2001 Burlington Free Press vs. UVM case in which the court considered “relevant factors” when it refused to allow the newspaper to obtain its legal costs – even though it won the right to review university documents. It’s this case public records advocates point to as the watershed event in the world of open government because it effectively silenced the press and others who are now obliged to sue the state or other public entities to see records that courts rule should be in the public domain anyway.
Winters said there is no guarantee – in spite of the fact that she won – that the court will award her attorneys’ fees.
“I could get denied because I don’t bill on an hourly basis or because I represent union members,” Winters said. “There are a lot of ways we could lose on fees.”
She expects the AG’s office to file a counter brief. The last time she asked for reimbursement for fees from the court system in 2008, she “got half the time I requested” and her rates were discounted.
Winters said: “We want to win (the fees) and send that message to the state.”
She sees the state’s ongoing willful delay of access to the records as the ultimate victory: “So much time has passed that the people who made the decisions aren’t in those positions any more. These two issues were hot topics this summer, and now there is not as much interest because it involves the old administration now. In a lot of ways I do feel they’ve already won.”
There are no consequences for denying the public access to state documents, Winters said, and she doesn’t put much faith in the new legislation under consideration in the House Government Operations Committee, which presumes that courts would award fees. Public records advocates say the presumptive language won’t guarantee those awards; only the verb “shall” would force the government to pay.
“What would stop a future agency or municipality from doing the same thing if there wasn’t some fear of attorneys’ fees or financial punishment or consequence?” Winters said.
Winters argues in her motion filed with the court that her case “pertains to the fundamental right of all Vermonters to freely inspect public documents” and in particular the right to review the expenditure of taxpayer money.
Read Motion for Attorneys’ Fees from Abigail Winters.
So just how many of these pesky requests does the state receive in a given year? In a report to the Legislature, the Agency of Administration says there were 1,941 requests in 2010; 1,748 in 2009 and 1,593 in 2008. The average time fulfilling those requests was about 38 minutes. Sixty-five percent of those letters asked for public documents from one department: Public Safety.
In all, state employees put in 1,217 hours to produce 22,500 pages of documents. The price tag? $21,277.
The data, however, is not complete. Jeb Spaulding, secretary of the Agency, said the report doesn’t include all agencies and departments. He said he is working to improve access across state government.
Gregory Sanford, the State Archivist, will be working with the Shumlin administration on its employee education effort and improved records management. Whether or not a record is public should be determined at the point of origination he said. In the digital world that means tagging the information properly so that it can be easily identified.
Sanford, who is pushing for improved management of records, said: “One of things that bothers me about current the debate is that the very positive aspects and potential value of records is being subsumed by a focus on the idea that government has become secret — hiding records from the public. We’re not consciously doing it’s just that they haven’t managed them well enough.”
