It isn’t because of custom or courtesy that Vermont’s House of Representatives passes each year’s budget and tax bills before giving the Senate a crack at them.
It’s the state Constitution, which requires that “revenue bills shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur in amendments.”
Technically, perhaps only tax measures qualify as “revenue bills,” because they’re the only ones that raise revenue. Budget bills just spend it. But the connection is inescapable; without going into debt, what is not raised cannot be spent — so budget legislation follows the same “House-first” rule.
The House finished its tax, budget and capital bills weeks ago, zipping them over to the Senate, which made some changes to all three and just zipped them back. Thus the stage is set for the next (though not quite last) phase of the 2011 session: the Days of the Conference Committee, when small groups of lawmakers from both houses meet to resolve their differences.
By most accounts, that is not likely to be a daunting task this year. The tax and spending differences between the houses were not inconsequential, but neither were they fundamental.
“There are questions about a variety of issues,” said House Speaker Shap Smith. “But I’m pretty comfortable about how the negotiations will go.” The two houses are not that far apart “in the big areas,” Smith said.
House Budget Chair Martha Heath, a Westford Democrat, agreed. She said while she and her House colleagues watched the Senate budget process, “I can’t think of any time that we threw up our hands and said, ‘Oh, no.’”
For the most part, she said, the senators “didn’t cut the House budget as much as they added to it” because “they had access to more General Fund money to spend.”
The Senate added some $570,000 more in tax increases to the House bill (H. 436), giving the state a little more to spend. The Senate bill increases taxes by $24.48 million by raising $7.98 million in additional “provider” taxes on hospitals, home health agencies and nursing homes; increasing a new health insurance claims assessment to 0.9 percent (the House proposed 0.65 percent); and hiking up the cigarette tax by 53 cents a pack (the House version of the bill included a 27-cent increase).
Neither the House nor the Senate version of the miscellaneous tax bill includes Gov. Peter Shumlin’s proposal to raise a new provider tax on dentists, which would have generated about $3 million in revenues.
If any issue sparks a flare-up in a conference committee, it could be that cigarette tax hike, already a source of contention between the Senate and Gov. Peter Shumlin as well as between the two houses. Shumlin forced Senate Democrats, including Senate President Pro Tem John Campbell, to back off from their preference for a dollar-a-pack hike. The House voted for a 27-cent-a-pack increase; the Senate approved a 53-cent increase.
Shumlin would prefer no cigarette tax hike at all. Smith, on the other hand, has “no problem” with a tax on tobacco, and Campbell backed the Senate’s decision.
The conferees seem likely to end up with a tax increase that’s considerably less than 53 cents, and maybe even less than 27. In either case, lawmakers would have to find the lost revenue elsewhere, or make a comparable cut in the budget.
Another possible source of friction could be the increase in the claims assessment. Smith says he isn’t enthusiastic about the 0.25 percent increase proposed by the Senate.
Not all the potentially divisive issues are big-money items, or even very important (or interesting) to the general public. One difference mentioned by Smith was the Senate’s decision to maintain the property tax exemption for hockey rinks associated with public schools. The House voted to end that exemption.
In the capital bill, the Senate has proposed spending slightly more than the House on improving telecommunications (a difference of $1.8 million), but slightly less for school construction (a difference of $2 million). The two houses also have different approaches to funding studies for the construction of the Vermont State Hospital (the House didn’t put any new money into the project while the Senate earmarked $2.6 million) and upgrading a biomass heating plant in Montpelier (the House set aside $8 million for the project; the Senate pruned the state’s investment back to $1.9 million). In many cases, a simple splitting of the difference could lead to an easy compromise.
The lack of major controversy here should be no surprise. Both houses are dominated by Democrats, most (though not all) of whom generally support the agenda of the Democratic governor. There is nothing in Vermont resembling the stark ideological clash that besets the federal government.
But in any legislative body, there is some jealousy between the two houses (each one thinks the other gets more attention). There are also parochial differences (urban-rural, northern-southern, eastern-western), and personal differences, including a few personal animosities. On occasion, these fissures can lead to squabbles more acrimonious than those that arise from out-and-out policy disputes. Just as academic politics is said to be so vicious because the stakes are so small, squabbles between politicians who think alike can get awfully nasty.
But legislative leaders seemed confident they could avoid undue rancor, and Speaker Smith said he still planned to end the session a week from Saturday.
Realizing that goal might depend on the events of the one phase of a legislative session that comes after the Conference Committee period: the final, one-on-one-on-one bargaining among the governor, the speaker, and the Senate leader. That should start toward the end of next week.
