Big Noise From Montpelier
Gentle Readers: The wry and somewhat theoretical examination of government budgets and their discontents originally scheduled for today will be postponed until Monday because yesterday the folks in Montpelier committed a new.
Which is to say, they made news, news of some magnitude as it turns out, and this being a news site, such news ought to be dealt with here.
Speaker Smith
For details, however, you are advised to consult your conventional print or electronic news source. Most of them employ quite competent if not excellent reporters, some of whom were actually on hand when this particular news was committed, as the News Guy, alas, was not.
Nonetheless, there is some advantage to being free from the constraints of the conventional news sources. If you can get more detail there, perhaps you can get more (or at least more free-wheeling) explanation here.
What happened was that the Democrats who run the Legislature announced some changes in their own $4.5 billion budget bill, the one that Gov. Jim Douglas has said he would veto.
The new provisions seem unlikely to persuade the Governor to do otherwise, though in some ways they move the total package slightly (perhaps minutely) closer to his point of view. One provision in the budget “Companion Bill” for instance, would encourage state workers to retire as a means of reducing the state work force, one of the Governor’s major goals.
Douglas opposes the budget bill because he says it spends too much and cuts too little. The changes made by the Democratic leaders, House Speaker Shap Smith of Morrisville, Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin of Putney and some of their committee chairs, actually adds a little more spending.
But it’s the pro-business, pro “economic development” kind of spending the Governor likes-new research and development tax credits for business, more money for expanding internet and cell phone service. The Democrats also agreed to cap unemployment compensation benefits (a Douglas position), and to postpone for another year the plan to limit the capital gains exemption in the state income tax.
That means they scaled back one of their proposed tax increases (though in a “revenue neutral” manner), also a small dip in the Douglas direction.
But perhaps more to the point, a dip in the direction of some of their own members. The capital gains preference is of special importance to some farmers and to folks in the forestry business. Farmers and folks in the forestry business have political clout in this state, and some of them are constituents of Democratic members of the House, all 95 of whom will probably be needed if Douglas’s veto is to be overridden.
Later, Speaker Smith said the changes were not made out of “a concern that we would lose votes on the override.” But then he acknowledged that the changes had not lost him any votes either. Asked if he was more confident of winning the override vote than he’d been the day before, Smith said, “these things are so fluid.”
Earlier, he’d been even blunter, saying, “I know it’s hard to take at face value, but I actually think this isn’t about shoring up votes or anything like that.”
Who would even suggest such a thing? Obviously, these Democrats leaders, votes to override safely in hand, simply sat around yesterday pondering how to make their budget even more brilliant and transform Vermont into a Utopia, until one of them just popped out with something like, “say, why don’t we put more R&D tax credits into the budget?”
Or maybe not.
As Smith sort of acknowledged in a statement he and Shumlin released, in which Smith said, “I’ve heard a lot of constructive feedback from small business owners, farmers, hi-tech innovators and working Vermonters about steps we can take to set the state on a more solid footing for the future”
Republican Leader Patti Komline of Dorset certainly thought there was as much politics as policy in the Democratic announcement.
“Despite the fact that they have a supermajority in the House and Senate, they did not have the votes, and so this is just meant to cherry pick and get those so they can override,” she said (on WCAX-TV, Channel 3, which had the best early coverage of the story)
Komline’s statement appeared both triumphant and submissive, asserting first that the Democrats didn’t have the votes then, but acknowledging that they may well have them now.
As usual, the truth may be more complicated than either the cynicism or the naiveté outlined above. Senators, representatives, members of the Joint Fiscal Office staff and even a few officials of the Douglas Administration have been talking for days. No one should be surprised that the lawmakers decided to tweak their budget.
It is possible to tweak and count votes at the same time.
Besides, if the Democrats are at risk of seeming a bit sly, Douglas is in danger of seeming downright irrelevant. The Governor has not had a good spring. The Legislature overrode his veto of the same-sex marriage bill. It probably would have overridden his veto of the renewable energy bill or he wouldn’t have let it become law without his signature earlier this week. Now he is about to become the first governor in Vermont history to veto a budget bill, perhaps the first to have that veto overridden.
He could spring back, of course. First of all, it’s still possible, of not likely, that the House will sustain his budget veto. Or maybe he won’t veto it. He could announce that these latest revisions moved the whole package just far enough in his direction to render it acceptable.
Not likely, either. Because the Companion bill says nothing at all about what seems to be the issue about which the Governor feels strongest – school costs. Douglas wants the schools to spend no more per pupil next year than this year. To persuade (or force?) them to do so, he wants the legislature to finance the annual contribution for teacher retirement from the Education Fund rather than from the General Fund, from which the payments have always been made.
That switch would increase property taxes unless schools make the deep cuts Douglas has called for.
On this issue, the Democratic leaders did not move a bit in Douglas’s direction. They didn’t have to. Smith said not a single member of his caucus had taken the Governor’s side in this matter.
Neither, it seems, did many members of the Republican caucus. Republicans in the House have backed Douglas’s general fiscal conservatism, his insistence on deeper budget cuts and fewer tax increases. But if there has been any support for his contention that the current school financing system is ” fundamentally broken and beyond repair, it has been so muted as to be unnoticeable.
Jim Douglas is still a relatively popular governor who will be favored to be re-elected should he run for a fifth term next year. Right now, though, at least on this issue, he gives the impression of being a leader who proclaimed a crusade, buckled on his armor, mounted his steed, and looked behind him to see…effectively nobody in the ranks.
Tags: Jim Douglas, Shap Smith
