House budget writers are nearing agreement on a spending proposal that absorbs nearly all of the $48 million in new taxes and fees proposed by the House Ways and Means Committee. The remaining $1.3 million would be put in a reserve.
Budget totals will be released Monday when the House Appropriations Committee is set to vote on the Big Bill.
The appropriations chair, Rep. Mitzi Johnson, D-South Hero, said the committee took a different tack this year.
“The big story in this budget is that we have addressed a big chunk of issues on our radar screen,” Johnson said. “We’ve made a really big dent in some of the child protection issues and dealing with the court system, support for families in getting people into treatment and continuing to try to address the opiate issue.”
While last year lawmakers lowered the base budget, this year the panel “nibbled” at smaller expenditures and found efficiencies.
Johnson said the cuts in last year’s budget were deep and have been sustained. “It wasn’t just a one-time kind of thing,” she said.
Some of those ongoing cuts include the elimination of 180 positions in state government and a reduction in benefits to 1,500 families in the Reach Up state welfare program who also receive federal payments for disabilities. The Vermont Housing and Conservation Board funding was cut by $250,000.
This year the cuts weren’t as substantial, Johnson said. “Here it was really about trying to reorganize and manage given the cuts that have gotten rolled out since last year. Pressure from the Medicaid budget was a huge deal. If you take that out — even with a lot of child protection stuff — if you take the Medicaid increases out, all of our growth rates change dramatically.”
Aside from the $1.7 billion Medicaid budget, which Johnson said the committee has worked hard to “scrub,” the biggest pressures come from automatic pay increases for state employees, state funding for K-through-12 schools, and the number of people who need state support for developmental services, especially patients who also pose a public safety risk.
“Because those pressures have been substantial, there are many other places in state government that haven’t seen any kind of increase in eight years,” Johnson said.
Some items, such as debt service ($71 million), state contributions to the retirement system ($110 million) and the general fund transfer to the education fund ($306 million) are simply untouchable, she said. (When asked if the Legislature could reduce education funding, Johnson replied: “Have you met our constituents?” in an allusion to pushback from voters who are already upset about high local property taxes.)
Mental health and disability service providers haven’t seen wages go up in eight years. The $3.2 million bump in the budget for those providers — called designated agencies — represents a 2 percent pay increase for workers whose low pay contributes to a turnover rate of 30 percent.
The Child Care Financial Assistance Program needs $10.5 million to increase subsidies for child care. The $1 million increase from the state is a “dent,” as Johnson put it.
House Appropriations made many small cuts along the way as lawmakers painstakingly reviewed the governor’s recommended budget over the past two months. Each member of the committee is responsible for reviewing specific programs and departments and reports back to the whole panel on what can be cut.
In the final week, lawmakers were down to the final 40 or so items on the cut-or-keep list. And on Friday, they played a game of “let’s make a deal” over competing priorities.
The choices were as difficult as ever.
Meals on Wheels for elderly shut-ins, or more funding for state colleges? Free needles for heroin addicts, or new police cars? A warehouse for liquor control, or a study on the expansion of the children’s Dr. Dynasaur health insurance program to adults up to age 26? Funding to give child care providers and mental health workers long-awaited raises, or motel vouchers for homeless families?
While the horse-trading between lawmakers is serious, gallows humor prevails. At one point, Rep. Bob Helm, R-Fair Haven, joked that “maybe the colleges could do Meals on Wheels.”
In the end, after days of back and forth, lawmakers eliminated the following: $3.4 million for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, $2.5 million for new Vermont State Police cars, $1.3 million in the base rate for hospitals, $600,000 for emergency housing motel vouchers, $174,300 for a child protection ombudsman, $170,000 for Meals on Wheels, a $40,000 special education study, a $35,000 increase for the Vermont Arts Council, $67,500 from tobacco prevention programs and $32,725 for suicide prevention.
The big winners that will get increases in spending on top of current levels of support include: the mental health and developmental services agencies ($3.2 million), child care financial assistance programs ($1 million), the state colleges (an $800,000 bump), a Dr. Dynasaur study (which went from $180,000 to $140,000), child protection programs ($317,000), the working lands grant program ($189,000) and the auditor’s office ($25,000).
Rep. Marty Feltus, R-Lyndonville, said her highest priorities are the designated agencies and child protection programs. Feltus wanted to spend no more than $5 million to $10 million on items from the so-called wish list and hoped to use the rest to reduce the tax and fee increases proposed by House Ways and Means.
Feltus will be voting against the bill Monday. “I personally am not satisfied,” she said. “I will not be voting on the package as it worked out. I had hoped we would allocate much less. I personally was trying to hold the growth of the general fund to 3 percent and hold growth of the increase in revenue to 3 percent. That’s not what House Ways and Means came up with.”
While the programs the committee has opted to fund are “great ideas,” Feltus said, she is not convinced “we have the ability to sustain that kind of budget.”
“I personally think we are pulling too much revenue out of the economy,” she said.
